


The Way to Tomorrow

by the-reylo-void (Anysia)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Chekhov's Arsenal, Companionable Snark, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Forgiveness, Gratuitous Use of Cabins, Grief/Mourning, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Prison, Redemption, Rey Needs A Hug, Sad with a Happy Ending, Solitary Confinement, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-05 23:56:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12199836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anysia/pseuds/the-reylo-void
Summary: "I don't know," Rey murmurs. "I think home is still quite a ways off for him."---Kylo Ren faces his sentence at the hands of the Resistance: a year of off-world solitary confinement, no communication with the outside world.But it's never that easy to leave old wounds behind.Or such deeply-forged bonds.





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

  * For [politicalmamaduck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/politicalmamaduck/gifts).



> I'll be honest: this is The Fic That Almost Wasn't. It was a slippery, wriggling thing that very nearly got away from me entirely, and it was only the utterly tireless encouragement of the anthology mods, particularly Mod Alexandra (politicalmamaduck), that gave me enough of a push to finally finish it. I dedicate this piece to her for cheering me on every step of the way and refusing to let me give up. This fic truly would not exist in its completed form without her support and friendship. Thank you, Alexandra — I owe you one. ♥
> 
> Tremendous thanks also to my second-round editor, Mod South (southsidestory), for her glowing praise and for making me think that readers will actually enjoy this foray into angst! I owe thanks as well to CoupdeFoudRey for reading the first half of the story when it was still in-progress and giving me a pep talk on characterization; I hope the second half is up to your standards! :)
> 
> UPDATE (3/11/18): This fic has been updated to make it a bit more compliant with The Last Jedi. Although the story itself is now canon divergent, certain nuances — particularly the name of Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and the events of Snoke's throne room — have been slightly modified to more closely match canon.

"Hold your head high, dear. You've done nothing that you should cower for."

Rey bites her lip and glances sidelong at Leia as they stand together in the narrow turbolift. Rey attempts to straighten her spine the same way the general seems to, but there is an iron resoluteness to the older woman's posture, a cold steeliness that belies the invisible weight bearing down on her.

"How long will this take?" Rey murmurs. The journey to the deepest floors of the Resistance base seems endless — the journey to this moment even longer.

"Not long." Leia's eyes flicker to the descending numbers on the turbolift panel, each lighting up in turn. "Ben has already been found guilty of..." There's a brief flash of pain on her patrician features. "...well. You've read the charges."

"Didn't really need to. I saw most of them firsthand." Rey pauses. "He hasn't made this easy."

Leia smiles, pinched and humorless. "On the contrary. Determining his guilt was quite easy indeed. My son was not subtle about his crimes."

"I don't know if he's subtle about anything, really."

Leia is quiet for a moment, and it seems to Rey as though it's just a fraction harder for the general to hold her head up. "I'm still trying to save him," she murmurs. "You've read the recommendation, I'm sure. I don't know if I'll be able to overrule them by myself."

Without thinking, Rey takes Leia's hand in hers and gives it a reassuring squeeze. "You won't be alone," she says softly. "You'll have Luke and me. And we've both agreed that exile is better than... that."

Leia takes a deep breath, squeezing Rey's hand back and offering her a weak smile. "You've grown so strong since that first day on D'Qar, Rey. I know I haven't asked for it, and the Force knows he doesn't deserve it, but the compassion you've shown my son..." Her eyes close for the space of a heartbeat. "You have my thanks, Rey. I don't think we ever would have brought him home without you."

A flash, a memory, a glowing lightsaber bisecting through a twisted creature, a dark stone chamber rattling with Force lightning, roars of rage and a heavy body draped protectively over her.

"I don't know," Rey murmurs. "I think home is still quite a ways off for him."

They spend the remainder of the ride in tight-lipped silence, hands clasped, each floor taking them closer to the final moments of judgment.

 

* * *

 

 

Immediately, Rey can sense the change in atmosphere from the tense, charged proceedings of Kylo Ren's trial (such as it was, a brief two-hour recitation of crimes, uncontested by the weary defendant). The room is lighter somehow, the tribunal members more relaxed.

One glance at the empty defendant's chair and she understands why.

"He's not here?" Rey hisses to Leia as they enter the spacious room. "They're going to sentence him without hearing from him?"

"The tribunal asked him to speak," Leia says matter-of-factly, nodding to Luke where he sits at a long table across the room and steering Rey towards him. "He declined. He was appointed counsel and refused to speak to them." She sighs. "Leave it to my son to start showing every ounce of his father's stubbornness at the worst possible time."

"We can't do this without him being here to speak for himself." Rey's brow is furrowed, and she shoots an irritated glare towards the assembled tribunal members as they ascend the dais and take their seats.

"Rey." Luke rises to his feet and places a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Be calm. Center yourself. You'll be no help to him if you're too agitated to express yourself clearly."

"I didn't say I wanted to help him." Rey can feel familiar tension bunching up in her shoulders as she takes her seat at the end of the table, Luke beside her and Leia on the opposite end.

She can feel the both of them staring at her, appraising, and wills steel into her spine and a steadiness to her gaze as she looks to the assembling tribunal.

Taking a deep breath, Rey closes her eyes and presses back, deep into her mind, seeking the familiar yet unpleasant tendril of energy that usually snakes along beside her own Force signature, the dark curl that is the tangled Force bond she shares with Kylo Ren.

With Ben Solo.

How terrified she'd been of their connection, when they'd first learned of it on Ahch-To. How infuriated she had been with the Force, that it would see fit to tie her to this hulking beast of a man, this pitiless murderer.

A memory of a gentle brush of hands, a bright flaring of the Force across ghosting fingertips, and Rey shuts her eyes tighter. 

A year now since Ahch-To, longer still since Starkiller, and Kylo's side of the bond has largely dimmed to an annoying presence rather than a painful push of consciousness. He's always _there_ , somehow, skulking at the back of her mind, buried deep and bound to her.

But now, as she reaches out, follows that tendril of the Force to the man behind it, there's an iron-fast wall, silence and steel as Kylo resolutely shuts her out.

When they'd first brought him to the Resistance, after he'd staggered into sight, bloodied and weak, supported almost wholly by Rey and his lightsaber in her hand, they'd placed him in chains and imprisoned him in a Force-shielded cell, watched over by droids in the hopes that they might be able to withstand the Supreme Leader's notorious destruction.

Instead, Kylo had been passive, withdrawn, saying nothing even at his own trial other than short, one-word confirmations or denials.

The tribunal members had breathed a sigh of relief, and noted the effectiveness of the Force shielding in rendering Kylo a neutralized threat.

Rey, for her part, could still feel his Force signature, feel the power that still rolled over him, dimmed and muted but very much present.

Luke and Leia undoubtedly could sense it as well, yet they remained silent, and Rey followed suit.

Those closest to him, she knew, understood that it was less the Force shielding than the total upheaval of his life, the realization of years broken and wasted that had rendered Kylo silent, withdrawn, defeated.

Two father figures in his life, and he'd slain them both. The second as much retribution for the first as it was a desperate attempt to save her life.

Rey closes her eyes and manages another half-hearted push against Kylo's mental wall even as it holds fast.

She tries to send him brief flashes of those last moments deep in Snoke's throne room: the dark lord dead and halved, the chamber shaking with the force of his death, the Praetorian guards defeated and scattered, Kylo bleeding yet draped over her protectively, shielding her from the fallout even as his pain screamed through the bond.

_An eye for an eye, Ben,_ she whispers to him, hoping that he'll hear, that he'll understand even as she herself doesn't quite.

_A life for a life._

 

* * *

 

"The findings call for execution in even the most lenient interpretation, General Organa. You know this." 

The chair of the tribunal is a graying, bespectacled Tarsunt with a cool, appraising stare, and Rey watches as Leia raises an eyebrow at his clipped tone.

"Under whose laws, Dand?" the general asks coolly. " I was unaware that the Resistance had codified sentences for charges such as these. Hence this tribunal's presence."

The Tarsunt does not smile. "We have not weighed this lightly, General. There can be no other punishment meted out to the Supreme Leader of the First Order."

"The First Order has been defeated, their remaining fleet scattered or captured, in no small part due to the detailed intelligence provided to command by Kylo Ren."

"Intelligence which we had no guarantee was accurate!"

"But was _._ " There's fire in Leia's eyes, and the diminutive woman has risen to her feet, staring down the tribunal with the passion and grit that Rey imagines has grown only more terrifying with age. "Not to mention the fact that our investigations have proven that he was the one who transmitted the initial warning about Starkiller Base to D'Qar. It could be argued that the Resistance itself would have been defeated long ago without that intervention."

"Are you prepared to argue this, General?" The Tarsunt stares at her over his glasses. "Does a mother's love so blind her to the need for justice?"

"This is not justice." Luke has risen to stand beside Leia, and Rey can feel the calmness he radiates even as the tension in the room rises. "This is vengeance. There's a difference."

"The leader of the First Order, a man who personally executed so many of our own forces, has fallen into our laps. You expect us to spit on the graves of our fallen and allow him to live?" a blue-skinned Squamatan pilot interjects, her pointed teeth bared in anger.

"He gave us the information to destroy the First Order's fleet and ended this conflict," Leia fires back.

"The least he could have done, considering..."

Rey presses her thumbs to her eyes as the room devolves into a volley of back-and-forth shouting until the Tarsunt angrily calls for order.

"Enough bickering like children," he says, white fur bristling. "What do you then propose, General? A parade of gratitude? A statue raised in tribute somewhere in the Core worlds?"

Leia exchanges a glance with Luke, who nods. "We thought exile a fitting punishment. A year's hard labor, perhaps, far out of Republic territory but closely supervised."

"Time to reflect on his crimes," Luke adds quietly. "To understand the gravity of it. It's difficult for him, being back in the Light after so many years. But death isn't the answer to it."

The Tarsunt stares at Luke and Leia for a long moment, exhaling on a deep, heavy breath before turning his attention to Rey. "I'd like to hear from the girl," he says finally. "You've no doubt noticed two telling vacancies within this tribunal: Commander Finn and General Dameron both recused themselves on your behalf. And now you sit with those arguing for leniency."

He leans forward on his elbows and props his hands against his chin. "I understand that Kylo Ren tortured you, Rey." His voice is soft, almost fatherly, and Rey bristles at it. "A brutal interrogation, similar to the one he dealt to then-Captain Dameron. We were lucky to save your friend Finn's life from the wounds Ren inflicted upon him in battle — a battle for you, as I understand it.”

He leans back in his chair. “You witnessed the destruction of Hosnian Prime, the power of Starkiller Base, the battle of Crait. So very many lives lost under Kylo Ren's blade and to the forces of the First Order."

His gaze is pointed, dark, accusatory. "But tell me, girl. Tell me what _you_ think this man's punishment would be."

"Damn it, Dand, you can't do that to—"

"You weren't there." Rey's voice is quiet but firm as she stands, and she can feel the tremor of the Force beneath her skin, in her blood. "At the end. You didn't see any of it. None of you did. " She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. "What those last moments looked like, what it felt like when Snoke fell."

She can feel Luke and Leia watching her, can feel Leia's total stillness.

Rey swallows hard, feels the sting of angry tears as she opens her eyes and stares down the Tarsunt.

_I didn't want any of this,_ she thinks bitterly towards him, towards the absent figure whose Force signature is silent beside her own. _I didn't ask for the Force, I didn't ask for the weight of it all, I didn't ask for our fates to be so damned intertwined. But this is what the Force wills. And this is what I have to do._

"He saved my life," she says, and her voice is tight in her throat. "There, at the end. I wouldn't bend, wouldn't give up the Resistance, and Snoke told him to…” A beat, a flash of memory, and her heart clenches painfully. “But he — Kylo — he killed Snoke instead."

The memories run fast and dark: Snoke's disbelief and fury as the Skywalker saber ignited, Kylo's hand coming sharp around Rey's wrist and pulling _,_ the dance of their blades against the Praetorian guards, fighting back-to-back so easily, as seamlessly as if they'd always stood together, and there, in the very last moment, a roll of lightning, a flashing blade, agony spearing white-hot through the bond as Kylo fell, shielded, held.

The tribunal is silent.

Rey blinks back the memories, blinks back the tears she doesn't quite understand.

"He saved my life," she whispers. "It's my turn to save his."

She reaches blindly under the table, past Luke, to clutch Leia's hand.

She meets the General's eyes, sees her own tears reflected back at her.

His mother understands.

 

* * *

 

The tribunal deliberates for hours.

Rey spends much of that time hunched down in her chair, biting at her fingernails.

There's still a kernel of darkness deep within her that she hasn't managed to vanquish completely, and it whispers to her that there's still time, she can change her mind, didn't she want to see Kylo destroyed, this man who had hurt her and her loved ones so? Didn't she want to watch the sun rise over the gallows as he was sent to his death, just a fraction of the pain he'd meted out handed back to him? Wasn't that fair? Wasn't that just?

"Here." Rey starts as Luke appears silently beside her, handing her a glass of water. "You look like you could use this."

Rey throws back the contents gratefully, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. "Are they almost finished?"

"Leia should be back in a minute or two. Says they've reached a decision."

Rey is quiet, thumbing at the edge of the glass. "And if they don't agree with us?"

Luke says nothing, merely places a comforting hand on her shoulder.

The tribunal members file in silently, once more taking their places upon the dais. Leia returns at Luke's side, and Rey feels her heart clench as Luke wraps an arm around his sister's shoulders and stares, stony-faced, to the Tarsunt as he clears his throat.

"This tribunal has reached a decision in the sentencing of Kylo Ren," he says formally, powering up a datapad and beginning to read. "Upon careful consideration of testimony and mitigating factors to the stated crimes, we hereby sentence Kylo Ren to one year's solitary confinement in the Outer Rim territories."

Leia clutches Rey's arm, and the general is unable to contain a strangled sigh of relief.

"This will include monthly deliveries of food and essential supplies via remote drop on droid-controlled missions," the Tarsunt continues.

Leia's grasp is painfully tight, and Rey can feel the wary relief radiating from her and Luke.

But Rey is a hardened veteran of bargaining, and she appraises the Tarsunt with the shrewdness of a hungry scavenger waiting to hear a price.

"However."

She tilts her chin up, waits.

"This year of isolation will be total. Ren will not be entitled to possession of any... shall we say diversions: no datapads, no holos, nothing that would be categorized as reading material or entertainment. There will also be no off-world contact of any kind. No letters, no transmissions, no comms."

The Tarsunt levels Luke with a sharp gaze. "You wanted the prisoner to have the time to 'reflect' on his crimes. Under such conditions, I imagine he'll have little choice."

"That's not fair."

Luke and Leia stare at her as Rey narrows her eyes at the Tarsunt, who folds his hands and eyes her patiently.

"You've never lived like that, have you?" Rey continues, ignoring Leia's troubled glance. "In that kind of quiet, that isolation? Because I have, and it's a brutal thing, to be alone like that."

" _Rey._ " Luke's voice is gentle but warning, and she bats his comforting hand away.

"I understand you did it for a number of years, Rey." The Tarsunt's tone is blunt, forceful, the threat of a harsher decision behind it. "As did you, Skywalker, if you'll recall, and neither of you as punishment for crimes against the galaxy. Surely you don't consider one year's isolation a fate worse than death?"

The word hangs in the air, heavy, foreboding, and Rey bites her tongue.

"Besides, girl," the Squamatan notes, glancing at the Tarsunt, "we did allow a provision of mercy, if it should be too overwhelming for the wretch."

"And what might that be?" Rey bites at her.

The Tarsunt stares at her for a moment.

"We've discussed the logistics with a member of our munitions team. He assured us that it's possible to load a depleted gas cartridge into a blaster. Just enough for one shot. Just in case Kylo Ren should find it necessary."

Rey's blood runs cold.

Distantly, she hears the Tarsunt reading out the prohibited list of items and communication channels, everything from commlinks to satellite droids.

She pushes back from the table, rises and makes her way to the far doors exiting the chamber.

Luke and Leia call to her, and she can hear a rumble of disquiet through the tribunal members.

Rey ignores them all, fairly slamming the doors behind her as she exits the chamber.

She didn’t know what she wanted for Kylo... for _Ben_ when all was said and done.

But it wasn't this.

 

* * *

 

The Resistance base's holding cells are sequestered far underground, beneath even the tribunal chamber, far from natural light, fresh air, any semblance of freedom. It's a gleaming-white compound, flooded with artificial light, rarely-used.

There had been a number of high-profile captures in the wake of the First Order's defeat, but justice had been far easier to determine for those; their crimes were straightforward, officers and the rank-and-file alike refusing the peace of surrender in favor of a fighting retreat.

Rey had heard that the sheer numbers had necessitated the re-opening of a penal colony two systems over, at least for now, until identities could be verified and sentences carried out.

The base compound holds only one prisoner.

Rey's shoulders are straight, her gaze narrowed and purposeful as she strides down the corridor towards his cell, willing her steps not to falter as she approaches the Force-shielded bars.

It's like being stabbed, every time she sees him. He's lounging on his narrow cot, seemingly at ease as he scrolls through a datapad, one leg crossed over the other, his back slouching against the duracrete wall.

"Well?" he asks, and his deep voice seems to echo through the corridor. He doesn't look at her.

Rey grinds her teeth, wills her hands to uncurl from the fists she's clenched at her sides. "You didn't come to the sentencing."

Kylo smiles, humorless. "Why would I, when I figured you'd tell me the results?" He powers down the datapad, sets it to one side. "Even though we both know you don't have clearance to be here. How many guard droids did you disable along the way?"

"Six."

"Impressive." He looks at her then, and even though there's a hint of a smile on his lips, his eyes are tired, reddened, and there's a scruff of beard along his chin.

He looks exhausted.

Rey tentatively reaches out through the bond and finds herself shut out yet again.

"Don't." Kylo closes his eyes and leans his head back against the wall. "I'd rather not have you in there."

Rey laughs, bitter and humorless, and curls her hand around the bars of his cell.

"Really," she says. "Like I would."

"Save your indignation for my funeral, Rey. Have they set a date?"

"No. They didn't vote for execution."

Kylo is quiet for a long moment, slowly opening his eyes to stare at her, something inscrutable in their depths.

"Exile," Rey continues, and the word hangs between them. "There are conditions. I'm sure they'll explain them to you when they announce it formally. They were still hammering out the details when I left."

"Conditions." The word is flat, unfeeling.

"No contact with the outside world. No diversions. They'll send you food and supplies via remote drop, but you'll have to make your own way outside of that."

"I see." Kylo's voice is disturbingly unaffected, and he seems to be staring at a point somewhere past Rey's shoulder.

Rey scowls at him. "Maybe it's not paradise, but you'll be alive. And I'll have you know, it _wasn't_ easy to keep your neck out of a hangman's noose. We fought hard for you."

"Yes, well." Kylo's lips twist into a sneer, and he turns his back to her. "Thank you for your impassioned defense."

Rey snarls, slams her hand against the cell bars. "You ungrateful brat," she hisses. "Your mother called in every single favor she had, swore blood oaths and bargained in back rooms just for a shred of hope of saving your life. Luke has every reason in the world not to stand up for you and he did."

"And you?" He's not looking at her, and the words are strangled.

Rey closes her eyes, rests her forehead against the bars. "You know why I did it."

She reaches out again, finds the wall shutting her out lifted just a little, so slight he likely isn't even aware of it, and she slips beneath it, finds the path to his innermost thoughts, down, down, _down_...

Rey’s eyes fly open, and she staggers back, feels his pain and anguish like poison burning through her veins.

"You wanted to die," she manages, can barely speak over the rolling wave of his emotions, and she cuts herself off before she drowns in it. "You wanted them to sentence you to death. _Damn_ it, Ben."

"There's no other way this ends for me," Kylo bites back. His arms are crossed over his chest, and he's huddled in on himself. "No way it should, not after everything."

His pain is radiating outward, and it's everything Rey can do to hold fast, anchor herself beside the bond and not be caught up in it. "That's the easy way out," she says, willing him to look at her. "The coward's way. You're many things, _Ben Solo_. But I've never known you to be a coward."

"And what do you know?" He's at the bars before she can even blink, towering tall, his dark eyes boring down into her. "You don't know half of what I've done. Just because you're in here," he says, jabbing one finger against his temple,"doesn't mean you know every life I've taken, everyone I've hurt, everything I've done that eliminates any other path to absolution than the one that sees my last breaths at sunrise."

He's breathing hard, wild-eyed, and Rey suddenly hates the force field wrapping around the bars and keeping her from him, from offering a steady hand to anchor him back in reality.

"Would you have seen me off, Rey?" he asks, and she falters, can never quite understand the way something in her jolts in those rare moments when he says her name. "Would you have been there in the last moments? Would you have told my mother that I..."

Kylo seems to deflate then, and he falls to his knees, rests his head against the bars and closes his eyes, pained. He says nothing further.

Rey feels a knot of unshed tears in her throat, and she tucks her hands against her sides, averts her gaze. "It doesn't matter," she says. "That's not your path. Not now."

"You should have left me," Kylo grinds out. "In the throne room, during the trial, during sentencing. You should have had an ounce of self-preservation and run as far and as fast as you could."

"It's not that easy and you know it," Rey bites.

Kylo sighs and closes his eyes, nods in weary understanding of the same reasons he'd always found himself seeking her.

_Because we're bound._

_Because we must exist side-by-side._

_Because you saved me._

"How long?" Kylo murmurs. He's still kneeling by the bars, avoiding Rey's gaze.

"A year," Rey says quietly. "I don't know if they can extend it. But it was a year when I left. Luke said it'll give you time to reflect. Maybe learn. Seek forgiveness."

"Optimistic timeline."

"I don't think it has to end there." Rey chews her thumbnail, glances down the corridor at the sound of approaching voices. "I think this is just the beginning."

Kylo tips his head back from the bars, stares up at her, and the dark eyes she's grown used to seeing narrowed in anger are empty, defeated. "I suppose we'll see what happens in a year,” he says. “Assuming I don't die in exile."

Rey feels a cold shiver down her spine.

_Just one shot._

_Just in case_.

"Promise me." The words have passed her lips before she even realizes she's said them.

Kylo stares at her.

"Promise me you'll come back in a year," she continues. "Promise me you'll live that long."

_Because this isn't over._

_Because there's so much we haven't discussed._

Kylo is silent, rising from his knees and moving to sit down heavily on his cot, his head in his hands.

He doesn't speak for a long moment.

Then, barely a whisper:

"Promise."

Rey seeks the thread of his consciousness through the bond, tries to find meaning behind his closed-off posture, the way he's staring at her like a wary, caged creature, but the walls are once more firmly in place.

 

* * *

 

It takes six days to finalize the logistics involved in Kylo Ren's exile. Rey removes herself from the deliberations, spends long hours in the base gym as she catches bits and pieces of arguments about this planet or that one, types and amounts of food rations, conditions and contingencies to be held for the next year.

Leia tells her of each development, and the general's eyes are often red.

The day of Kylo's departure from base is overcast, cold, and Rey does not see him off. Instead, she stares at the chrono in the gym, curls her fingers inside the boxing gloves on her hands, and tries to imagine the scene occurring down-base at a quiet launching pad.

"Ready to vent some frustration, Rey?"

She turns her attention from the chrono and breaks into a relieved grin as Finn appears through the gym's double doors, sparring gear in tow. "You read my mind," she says, leaning in as he wraps a comforting arm around her shoulders.

"Speaking of mind-reading." Finn falters for a moment, glancing toward the south end of the base. "Are you..."

Rey closes her eyes for a heartbeat. "I don't want to talk about it. Not now."

Finn nods and slips on his punch mitts, striking them together. "Right. No talking about anything dark and gloomy today. Just you and me and that badass right hook of yours. Put 'em up."

Rey laughs and easily settles into a practiced series of punches and jabs. It'd been Finn who had first insisted on teaching her how to throw a solid punch, her experience in bare-hand combat somewhat lacking compared to the comfortable range of her staff and saber.

She drifts back, remembers to not long after the Battle of Crait, bearing fresh scars from her frantic battle at Kylo's side and his thoughts terrifyingly tangled with her own, when Finn had slipped the gloves onto her hands and set her in the practice ring.

"I don't know anything about all of this Force stuff you're caught up in," he'd said, "but if you ever go up against him again, I want you going in with every advantage you can possibly have."

The 'him' had hung unspoken between them, in the faded burn scars along Finn's shoulder and spine, in the rolling darkness that lay parallel to Rey's own consciousness.

"Been awhile since we did this," Rey says, rolling her eyes with a grin as Finn blocks a particularly pointed jab. "Since things were calm enough to do this."

"Not sure if they're all that calm now," Finn grunts as Rey slams into him. "The First Order may be gone, but there are so many systems who collaborated, power vacuums, broken treaties..."

Rey grins. "Listen to you. You sound like a senator."

Finn hesitates just a fraction too long, and Rey halts in her punching, eyes him quizzically. "Finn?"

He avoids her gaze, slipping one hand from its mitt to rub at the back of his neck. "Not a senator," he admits, "but, well, Leia, with the New Republic re-forming and trying to bring everything back together... she said she wanted, well, someone she could trust."

He offers her a helpless half-grin. "Her words, not mine. Nothing super political or anything like that, just making sure that the Resistance is 'well-represented'. Whatever that means."

"Where is she sending you?" Rey feels suddenly cold, and she glances to the chrono, registers that Kylo's ship must be gaining atmo at that very moment.

"Coruscant. Into the belly of the beast, I guess."

"Just you?"

"I..." Finn flushes, and Rey stares at him curiously. "Me and Rose. You know, after Canto Bight, I think she — _we_ decided that we, um. We work pretty well together."

Rey can't help the slow smile that crosses her features, and she removes her gloves and tosses her arms around Finn's shoulders in a tight hug. "I think you do, too," she murmurs, then grins wide. "'Big Deal.'"

"Oh Force, I told you not to bring that up again."

"Rey?"

They pull apart at the sound of Leia's voice calling softly from the doorway, Luke silent and somber at her side.

"General." Finn stands at attention, and Leia smiles fondly at him.

"At ease, Commander. This isn't a formal call. I just wanted to discuss a few logistics with you before your transport is scheduled to leave."

Rey stares at her, then at Finn. "Wait. When are you starting this mission of yours?"

Finn hesitates, glancing at the chrono and avoiding her gaze. "2100 hours," he admits.

"Today." Rey's voice seems to catch on the word.

Finn frowns a little in worry, squeezes her shoulder. "I just found out yesterday. And I didn't want you to worry, not with everything going on."

"No, no, it's fine," Rey waves off his explanation, the open concern in his eyes. "I just," she starts. There's a knot in her throat, a sharp pain in her chest. "I'm so happy for you, Finn."

"Really?" He's unsure, appraising her face, rubbing her shoulder in comfort. "Rey, if you don't want me to go, I'll tell them to take their mission and..."

"Commander." Leia's voice is humored but stern.

Finn winces. "Sorry. But seriously, Rey."

"It's fine." Rey manages a smile, lets Finn draw her into a tight hug and holds it as long as she can.

He's her best friend, one of the dearest people in the world to her, and she loves him so much, this frightened man who'd become the next great hope of the Resistance, a hero, one of the brightest lights in the galaxy. He can help so many people, help bring about the next stages of peace in a world balanced on a knife's edge and facing the void.

Instinctually, Rey knows this, understands this.

But, she thinks, closing her eyes, allowing herself to be held and comforted for just a fraction longer...

She's tired of doing the right thing.

She's tired of having to be strong.

And she's tired of people leaving.

"Rey?" Finn's voice is quiet at her ear, thick with concern.

Kylo's end of the bond is silent, unreachable. Finn is pulling away.

Rey manages to smile and hold herself tall.

"You'll do great," she says.

 

* * *

 

Leia speaks quietly with Finn for long moments as Rey ducks her head and walks to Luke's side.

The Jedi is taciturn as he glances sidelong at Rey. "You seem unsettled."

"I couldn't feel him," Rey mutters. "This morning, when he was supposed to depart. He's shut me out ever since the sentencing, back when I visited him in his cell."

"Where you weren't supposed to be, of course." Rey glances at him in annoyance, but Luke merely offers her a faint smile. "His ship departed on time. The tribunal finally settled on Arbooine as his destination. Leia fought hard for that — they'd wanted to place him on a far more desolate world, batted around the ideas of something iced over or deserted like Jakku. Arbooine may be isolated and a whole lot of nothing, but it's green and wooded and peaceful. The Rebellion used it as a remote outpost during the war."

"Better than he deserves, most likely," Rey gripes. "I'd have dropped him straight down onto Jakku. See how he manages to gain his portions or navigate the Goazon Badlands."

"Angry with him, are you?"

"Aren't you?" Rey bites. She crosses her arms tightly over her chest, the memories of her and Kylo's last conversation rattling deep. "He wanted to die, Luke," she says quietly.

Luke nods. "I know, Rey. I know."

 

* * *

 

Finn takes his leave with one last tight hug around Rey's shoulders. "I'll see you soon, okay?" he says, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

Rey nods, closing her eyes tight. "Always."

Kylo's side of the bond is still dark. Silent.

 

* * *

 

"You didn't mention it, there at the sentencing," Leia says over a cup of caf, and Rey stares at her.

The base cantina is quiet, empty but for herself, Leia, and Luke at one of its long tables, cups of steaming caf between them.

"The bond you two have, whatever it is." Leia fixes Rey with a pointed look. "When they listed out all of the restricted forms of communication during his exile. You didn't bring it up."

Rey is quiet, turning her hands over in her lap. "No one asked," she says finally. "Did you mention it these last few days?"

Leia sips her caf but says nothing.

"We thought it better not to call attention to it," Luke finally offers. "The tribunal was already uncomfortable with your defending Ben, and more than a few of them are skittish and superstitious when it comes to the Force." He frowns. "This trial has been a tightrope walk, Rey. One wrong step can have grave consequences."

Rey furrows her brow and stirs her caf. "But if the tribunal doesn't know about the bond we have, why can't I feel him? I didn't even feel his side of the bond when he left."

Luke and Leia exchange a long glance.

"Ben needs total isolation to find something approaching inner peace, to seek that balance with the Force that he's never been able to achieve," Luke says after a moment. "That's why we'd advocated for his exile in the first place — to give him the time, the space, the silence to reflect on everything he's done."

"And maybe give us the space to forgive him," Leia says quietly. "In time."

"And what does this have to do with me? With the bond, or whatever it is?"

Luke sighs and runs a hand through his graying hair. "We spoke to Ben before his departure. He agreed to shutter his side of the bond for the duration of his exile. To keep you out."

There's a sudden spike of anger deep within her chest that Rey doesn't understand, and she finds herself rising to her feet before she even realizes it. "And you didn't ask me? You didn't _tell_ me?"

"Rey," Leia starts, reaching one hand out comfortingly.

"He's keeping us out as well," Luke continues. "Rey, he can't heal from everything he's done if he's still tethered to the people who care about him."

"I _don't_ ," Rey bites, slamming her spoon down next to her caf. "I just. I wanted..."

Luke and Leia look at her expectantly, but the anger rushes out of her all at once as she realizes she does not know what to say.

Luke takes a long, slow draught of his caf. "Rey," he says, "from the moment we realized what existed between the two of you, that day on Ahch-To, you've followed me and begged me to break it, to find a way to release you. You have that freedom now, at least for awhile. Why not use it?"

Rey's hands ball into fists beneath the table, and she can't help but glare at Luke, his utter calmness, the untroubled way he sips his caf.

They're his family, he and Leia.

She's just a scavenger from the wilds of Jakku, a latent Force-sensitive caught up in something far too grand and inadvertently shackled to the sad-eyed boy they'd lost.

And yet it's beyond her capacity to describe it to them, how deep the bond between she and Kylo runs, how irrevocably tangled they've become in the last year.

How she feels his loneliness at night, how he breathes in hers and somehow they're so very lonely together.

How their conflict and compassion is multiplied and mirrored back at each other, and it's acid-tinged pity and bone-deep empathy all at once.

How she's felt his pain and anguish every minute since Snoke had turned ice-blue eyes to her and commanded him to kill.

Ever since he _couldn't_.

And she can't describe, not to them, not even to herself, how she thinks to his exiled home far beyond the stars, thinks of him alone in the silence, and is afraid for him.

"Rey?" Leia's voice is soft and pulls her from her reverie. "Rey, are you all right?"

"You're right," Rey says quietly, sits back down and stares into her caf. "This is the best thing for him, I'm sure."

Luke nods, but it's a heavy, somber thing. "Time will tell."

Outwardly, Rey offers him a half-hearted smile, sips her cooling caf.

Inwardly, she reaches out across the stars, seeks that dark tendril of the Force that has lain beside hers for the past year, and is dismayed to once again find nothing.


	2. Part II

Far be it for a girl raised by sinking sands and scuttled starships on Jakku to be judgmental of any world, Rey knows, but Geonosis is awful.

Jakku, for its isolation, was familiar — the young girl who’d not yet plucked Dosmit Raeh’s name from a long-faded strand of Aurebesh on a shattered helmet gained her footing on its dunes. The sharp-eyed and bony-ribbed scavenger who’d longed for her family mastered its hidden dangers, found hope in broken durasteel and double portions on cold desert nights.

The woman who became Rey misses a place, however desolate, that almost felt like home.

Geonosis has Jakku’s heat, the wind-whipped sands, but it’s somehow even more bleak, scorched by battle marks, heavy with the reminders of wars long-fought and men long-dead. The Resistance base that rises from its sands is set into the side of a enormous ridge, protected from the worst of the battering sandstorms that are closely watched and matched to flight schedules.

“It’s served its purpose,” Leia notes when she catches the way Rey grimaces at the horizon, the way the sands swirl and dust seems to forever settle into the folds of her robes. “The First Order may be disbanded, but we haven’t identified all of its sympathizers just yet. I sleep better at night knowing that we still have a base or two off their radar.”

Rey frowns at that, glances from the horizon back to Leia. The dark circles that appeared under the general’s eyes during Kylo’s trial seem almost permanent now, and the fire and steel that stood at command and saw a scattered rebellion take back the stars seems somehow dimmed.

“I don’t remember what it’s like to sleep well,” Rey admits. She raises her eyes to the spangled stars visible even in the daytime, wonders along which hyperspace lane, in which system lies the other side of the Force bond that feels somehow like it’s been ripped from her. “Do you?”

Leia is quiet for a long moment.

 “When the nurses placed him in my arms. When I thought I could still protect him. I slept well then.”

Leia stares up at the stars beside her.

“Not one day since,” she says quietly.

 

* * *

 

The interior of the base is sleek and modern in a way that belies its sandswept exterior. It dizzies Rey every time she steps inside it, all flashing screens and rolling voices.

There’s a large curved screen taking up most of one wall, the latest from the HoloNet about each high-profile capture from the First Order: a blurry picture, name, rank, and dossier, and their status.

Rey watches them just once, sneering officers in black caps and straight-backed, hollow-eyed boys holding Stormtrooper helmets at their sides.

Some of the most high-profile officers’ screens flash red with ‘at-large’ warnings and scaled-up bounties.

Most are quietly marked ‘deceased’.

When Kylo appears, she recognizes the dark-eyed, somber portrait the Resistance had forced him into shortly after capture, now blazoned with “ **IN CUSTODY** ” in bold typeface.

But there’s something else, a series of bars and panels, blinking and modulating.

Rey steps closer, squints, tries to read the markers before the screen fades away.

_Heart rate. BP. Sleep cycle. Alertness._

“Trackers.”

She jumps at Luke’s voice behind her, nearly catching her hip at the edge of a data terminal. “What?”

“Before he left, they injected him with trackers.” Luke gestured to the screen. “One of the tribunal’s provisions. They wanted to be sure of where he was. _How_ he was.”

“They didn’t seem too concerned with him at the sentencing,” Rey notes. She closes her eyes, feels an involuntary shiver.

_One shot._

_Just in case._

“He’s still alive.” Luke is steady beside her, eyes soft and unfathomable. “For now, that’s enough.”

 

* * *

 

Finn sends Rey holos from Coruscant. She watches them at night in her bolt-hole of a bunk, away from the rest of the remains of the Resistance, so many fighters gone back to broken homeworlds and war-ravaged systems.

“There’s _everything_ here,” Finn says in amazement, tilting the viewer so Rey can see around him, the dazzling lights, the noise, the seemingly endless swells of people, and she feels dizzy. “This place… it’s the _anti_ -Jakku.”

Rey frowns a little and burrows more into her bunk, still oddly defensive of her backwater homeworld, even so long removed from it.

“Yes, and you’re determined to explore it by mouth alone.” Rose peeks into the lower frame of the holo, grinning widely and waving. “We miss you, Rey! I think Finn’s eaten something from vendors of at least thirty systems just over the last week.”

“Hey — I’m an _ambassador_. It’d be rude not to make friends with representatives from as many different systems as I can.”

“Through their spice cakes?” Rose rolls her eyes fondly and jerks her head towards Finn. “He’s impossible.”

“You love it.”

“Oh?”

Rey can’t help but smile as the two of them start to bicker, but it fades as she registers their wide grins, their easy banter, the way their hands brush against each other and jerk apart.

She’s happy for them, she is, but somehow, even after so many years spent scraping by in isolation on Jakku, she’s never felt quite so alone.

_It’ll be good for you, too, Rey_ , Luke had said in those first few days after Kylo had departed. _Ben has_ _sunken down so far into your consciousness that it’s almost like you’ve been poisoned. The darkness, that conflict. Use this time to meditate and find your light, your balance, outside of the bond between you._

Rey huddles more deeply into the blankets, until just her eyes are peeking out, taking in how content and at ease Finn and Rose are in each other’s company, how everything seems to be moving so fast around them in Coruscant.

How quiet her own world feels now.

Absently biting the inside of her cheek, she reaches out across the stars, searches, _feels_ , unsurprised when she meets emptiness.

She sighs, thumps her head back against the pillows.

Leave it to Kylo to actually listen to his family’s instructions this one time.

“...in it with the Resistance for a little while longer. Hope you’re holding up, Rey — come see us soon!”

The holo switches off, and the image of Finn and Rose smiling side-by-side seems to linger in the darkness of her chamber.

Rey sighs again and flops back harder into her bunk, curling up on her side the way that she used to in her hammock, small and tight against the cold desert winds that always seemed to seep through the cracks and rattle the sun-baked walls of her AT-AT.

Arbooine. She remembers Luke mentioning the name, and she closes her eyes, tries to picture it. Forested. Green.

There’s a plane of transparisteel set into the thick sandstone wall of her chamber, and Rey reaches across from her bunk, sets her fingers to its cool surface. Geonosis’s night sky is starswept, several moons rising like spots of white along its horizon.

It’s peaceful, somehow, even here on these lonely nights, and Rey grazes one fingertip over the cresting shadow of the nearest moon.

_Wherever you are,_ she thinks into the absent space where the bond holds tight, _I hope it’s quiet. I hope you have the time and space to think._

_I hope you find peace._

It’s a fleeting thought, one that passes through swiftly as she moves from the moonlit transparisteel and sets her cheek to the pillow, brushing against the back of her mind as sleep overtakes her.

She wonders if Arbooine has a moon.

 

* * *

 

Rey’s eyes seize open to see blood-red walls, obsidian stone, agonizing screams and bolts of lightning sparking hot and bright past her.

She stumbles backwards, struggling to breathe, her muscles heavy and she’s in _pain,_ all along her side, her hand coming away from her ribs wet with blood.

_Memories,_ she thinks, tries to push back the ice-cold spike of terror as she stumbles back over the fallen body of a Prateorian guard, as Snoke’s twisted, deformed features come into view. _Just a dream. Just a **dream**._

She reaches frantically for her saber as Snoke bears down on her, but she finds nothing at her hip.

Her eyes are wide with fear, sweat dotting along her brow, and she’s lifted off her feet by her throat, one of Snoke’s gnarled hands wrapped tight, sadistic glee in his eyes.

And there, distantly, in the shadows at the edge of the chamber, she sees Kylo.

_Ben._

He’s fighting hard, held in place by something unseen, speared by bolts of Force lightning as he struggles desperately forward.

Trying to get to her _._

_This isn’t how it happened_ , Rey thinks in a panic as something holds her immobile, as Snoke’s hand squeezes tight.

“Watch, boy,” she hears Snoke say, and his voice is almost gentle even as it echoes around the chamber. “You could have stopped this. You could have saved her.”

_It wasn’t like this!_ Rey struggles, tries to wrench herself from Snoke’s grasp. _It wasn’t!_

She’s weakening, faint, willing herself to bolt awake, to pull out of the nightmare that seems so vivid and dark all around her. It doesn’t make sense: they’d killed him, _Ben_ had killed him, and yes Snoke had tortured her but Ben had run him through, why would she be dreaming that he _…_

Her eyes widen in realization.

It’s not her dream _._

_Ben!_ she screams through the bond, fighting with everything she has against Snoke’s grip, finally freeing her hands from his Force hold and scrabbling against the pale, gnarled one gripped tight around her throat. _Ben, wake up! It didn’t happen like this! It didn’t!_

The dark, immobilized figure at the edge of her vision struggles harder.

_Ben_. She’s all but weeping his name through the bond, and she can’t last much longer, weak from fighting, everything slowly fading, fading darker and darker and darker…

And then there’s nothing but a black, empty landscape, nothing up or down, left or right.

Snoke’s chamber is gone, fading into an oily black smoke. Snoke is gone, and Rey sucks in greedy lungfuls of air, massages her sore throat with one hand.

And there, on his knees in front of her, trembling violently, is Ben Solo.

She falls down beside him, grasps his face roughly in her hands and forces him to meet her eyes.

His own are wet with tears, unfocused, flickering wildly.

“Ben _,_ ” she says, and her voice is weak, rough, but it reverberates.

Dark eyes suddenly focus on her face, flash with recognition.

Rey gasps as he falls heavily against her, shoulders shaking, and she clutches him as he weeps.

The bond is white-hot, ripped open between them, and Rey clings fast, surrenders to it as the nothingness begins to fade all around them.

 

* * *

 

When Rey wakes, the sun is bearing down on her through the transparisteel, the sheets on her bunk are drenched in sweat, and her cheeks are stiff with dried tears.

She reaches out through the bond, tentative, afraid of the rush of pain she expects to meet her.

She finds a wall.

Slammed shut and bolted, impenetrable, unassailable.

But she’s found him.

 

* * *

 

Once, on Jakku, Rey’s haul had been particularly meager, just two quarter portions for a full day’s scavenging, her hands burned and tongue parched after hours spent in the belly of an upturned Star Destroyer.

But she’d come away from the haul with a cheap tin puzzle box from what she assumed had been a soldier’s private quarters, the lock bent in and jammed.

Plutt hadn’t wanted it, so she’d kept it, and for three nights she’d hammered away at it, chipped at rust and uncovered the mechanism holding it shut. It’d taken another three nights before the warped lid sprang open, and even though all she’d found within had been scraps of paper and a broken comm, it had been worth it, the challenge of breaking through the pins and steadfast metal for six nights to find what lay inside.

It only takes two nights to break through to Ben.

She’s not sure he notices at first, and she can’t be certain that she’s found him until she’s in the base cantina, mindlessly digging through her dinner rations when it hits her.

Something fragrant and green. Cool air. The phantom bite of an insect against her bicep and a muttered curse.

_Ben?_ she thinks, searches for a crack in the wall and slips through it.

She feels him jolt, feels the unsteadiness of the bond, the way he stumbles and tries to shut it, but she’s through _._

For a moment, it’s almost disorienting — the bond has been shuttered for nearly a month’s time, and even with it still half-closed, the Force slams into her like the swollen waves of Ahch-To, overwhelming.

Then:

_You’re not supposed to be here. But then you always did strike me as the rebellious sort._

Familiarly deep, droll, with the hint of exasperation and weariness that is so very typically Ben.

_You shut me out_. It’s through the bond before she can pull it back, and Rey mentally curses herself even as she finishes her meal and steals from the cantina, her head down, eyes darting to the sides furtively.

_You never cared before_.

_I don’t care **now**_ , Rey bites into the bond as she sneaks back to her secluded quarters. Every noise makes her jump, every person passing at her periphery reminding her of Luke, of Leia, of how very much she should not be doing this.

There’s a disbelieving chuckle, a flash of dark eyes, and she hears his voice like a dark, taunting whisper.

_Liar._

Rey ignores him, quickly inputting the scancode to her chamber and bolting the door behind her once she’s through. _Worry about yourself, with that nightmare you had last night._

The bond goes quiet, and Rey scowls, braces herself hard to keep Ben from slamming his mental barriers down and shutting her out once again.

_It was nothing,_ she hears Ben mutter. She strains, tries to feel where he is, see it, see _him,_ but he’s pushing back against her, holding her at arm’s length.

_You sent it through to me._

_Just this once,_ he sneers, and it’s a testament to how deeply this bond, this thing between them runs that, even systems apart, even with him struggling to shut down the walls and force her out, she can feel his bluster, the way he dons his emotional armor and stares her down with steely-eyed indifference. _You think you’ve never screamed one of your nightmares through the bond to me? You think I’ve never woken to your tears?_

It’s mocking, cruel, and perhaps once, early on, when all Rey felt for him was anger and she had the luxury of not understanding, she would have spat expletives at him, pulled back and left him to his own acid tongue.

Once, perhaps.

But not now.

Not now when she can feel Ben’s pain bristling at the edge of her consciousness, when she can feel how loosely he’s stitched together, how the merest breath will shatter his fragile guards.

_And you think_ , she says, gazing through the transparisteel to the distant moons, _this is the first time I’ve felt you scream?_

A flash, a spike of something searing-hot and pained down her spine, through her belly.

The bond slams shut.

 

* * *

 

He keeps her out for the better part of a week.

Ben is stubborn, anticipating the brush of her Force signature against his, and she can barely catch a brief flash of towering trees and a muted pain before he is once more unreachable.

Every day, Rey meditates, looks out to the dusty Geonosian horizon and stares up at its cresting moons.

Every day, she visits Leia in the command room, glancing furtively behind her to the vid screens, feels a swell of relief in her chest when Ben’s vital signs flash into view. Steady. Alive.

“I wish we knew more,” Leia says one day, startling Rey’s attention from the screen.

“What?”

Leia smiles humorlessly, tips her head towards the screen. “They’re due to make another remote drop of supplies in a few days. Rations, a fresh med kit and the like. But I can’t help but wonder what he’s doing. How he’s doing outside of vital signs. You as well, it seems.”

Rey is quiet, frowning a little and glancing around to ensure that the Resistance members around them are otherwise engrossed in their tasks. “It’s difficult,” she admits, avoiding Leia’s gaze. “To have heard him for so long, and now there’s just nothing.”

She stares at the screen, the slow digital parade of war criminals and the tormented man among their ranks. “I hated him,” she says quietly. “When he… with Han.”

Her eyes soften at the brief wince of pain that crosses Leia’s features.

“I hated him,” Rey says again, “and even though I didn’t want him dead, not really, I never wanted to understand. But…” She closes her eyes. “We got familiar. Maybe even close, in some odd, twisted way. Entwined, somehow.”

Leia nods, draws Rey into a tight embrace.

“I know what it’s like to be angry and miss him all at once,” Leia says softly. “I know.”

Rey isn’t quite sure that’s what it is. She doesn’t want it to be.

But it feels so nice to be comforted that she doesn’t protest.

 

* * *

 

On the seventh day, Rey lies in bed, bathed in the light of Geonosis’s closest moon, and she once more finds Ben’s mental walls held a bit less tightly closed.

She almost smiles as she slips past them. _Will you ever stop underestimating me, Ben Solo?_

It’s so much more vivid this time, and she’s suddenly awash in the scent of fragrant pine and lake water. The shifting shadows of the muted Force bond give way to a lush forest, all towering trees dappled with sunlight, the silver ribbon of a broad river curling along the horizon.

And there, in a clearing, cursing loudly, is Ben.

A giddy thrill runs through her as Rey realizes that she’s through, really through the bond, and she quickly takes in every detail, commits it to memory before Ben notices her and shuts her out again.

It’s late afternoon on Arbooine, from the looks of it, everything bathed in the orange-gold light that presages a near-setting sun. There are rusted metallic ruins set into a rocky slope about a hundred paces past the clearing.

And then there’s the wooden frame of a cabin rising within this space carved from the thick forest, tall beams and a sturdy-looking foundation. It looks scarcely half-finished, but it’s an impressive construction just the same, everything evenly spaced, dark wood shining in the late-day sun.

She watches, fascinated, as Ben slots a beam into place, thick arms bulging, and he squints and runs a hand through his hair with a low curse.

They must be feeding him better than she’d thought, especially for a condemned prisoner held in exile — he’s dressed simply in a light tunic and trousers, but he seems bigger than he had even in his tiny Resistance cell, broad-shouldered, thick-armed, lightly-tanned from the sun.

_Are you going to say something or just stare at me until sundown?_

Rey jumps as Ben speaks to her through the bond. He’s leaning against the half-finished frame, glancing up at the sky, lips twisted into a frown.

_I didn’t think you’d noticed I was here._

_Of course I noticed. You’re as subtle as a rancor when you come charging in. I still have a headache from the way you’ve been trying to push through for the last week._

Rey rolls her eyes and snuggles deeper into bed. _It’s your own fault for not just letting me through in the first place._

She feels wariness, curiosity through the bond, watches as Ben crosses his arms and seems to stare her through, even across the stars, across systems.

_I still don’t understand why you’d want me to._

It’s not mocking or snide, the way he usually is when he’s cornered by her, all snapping teeth and narrowed eyes like the wounded, combative creature he is. He seems weary and unnerved all at once.

_It’s night here,_ Rey thinks, and Ben raises an eyebrow at the sudden change of subject. _I guess the day cycles of our systems are different._

_You don’t say._ He rolls his eyes, and ah yes, there’s the obnoxious Ben she knows so well. _Where have they taken you?_

_Geonosis._

Rey blinks in surprise as Ben’s lips twitch in a hint of a smile. _Suddenly being dropped in the middle of the woods for a year doesn’t sound so bad. That place makes Jakku look habitable._

_Watch yourself, Ben._

_Just being honest. I’d imagine you’ve had your fill of the desert by now._

Rey frowns, tugging his attention to the half-finished cabin behind him. _What’s the story behind that? I didn’t think you were supposed to be given anything as a “diversion”._

Ben shrugs, absently raps on one of the beams with his knuckles. _I wasn’t. Found some abandoned tools in what was left of the base, some aged Veshok wood behind it. I haven’t found anything that suggests it’s native. Probably imported for some project that was never finished. I'm sure they'll either blast it or me to vapor when they see it._

He sends Rey a series of images: the dark, decaying interior of a hollowed-out Rebellion base, a nest of bedding and a dim lantern near a decrepit crawlspace.

It reminds her of her AT-AT, and she feels that unpleasant sting of homesickness that never seems to fade entirely. But Ben, for all his bluster and anger, is soft, spoiled, and there’s a part of Rey that struggles to see him fitting neatly into such austere surroundings. _I can see why you'd like something a bit more comfortable,_ she observes.

Ben shakes his head, ducks his gaze away from her. “That's not it at all,” he says after a moment. 

His voice is raspier than usual as he speaks aloud for surely the first time in weeks, and there's something in Rey that hurts to hear it.

“Then what is it?” she responds in a furtive whisper, glancing at the door to her quarters.

Ben says nothing, and she can feel the internal barriers he's set up to block her probing.

Rey sighs in frustration, ducking her head under her pillow. _I didn't even know you knew how to build anything,_ she thinks, and there's a touch of irritation, of acid to it. _As skilled as you are at breaking._

She’s tired of him fighting her, damn it.

Pain suddenly flares through the bond, and her mind is flooded with red-tinged flashes of memory, a young boy with dark, messy curls and big ears, tongue sticking out in concentration as he hammers a nail into a plank of wood with gentle strokes.

_“Gotta be a little harder than that, sport,”_ Rey hears, a familiarly gruff yet teasing voice, and she feels a lump rise to her throat as the visage of Han Solo appears, takes the hammer and shows the boy how it's done.

The bond is on fire, agonized, and she pulls back, stares through it as Ben falls to his knees, head in hands, shoulders shaking.

_My father taught me,_ he says, and somewhere within the flow of memory the young boy weeps, even as the man cannot.

Not “Han Solo.”

His father _._

_Why are you here?_ Ben bites at her, and Rey has to choke back a sob: for him, for Han, for herself, she’s not sure.

_I needed to know you were okay._ He’s shaking, and Rey’s fingertips burn with the need to touch him, to feel that he’s solid, alive.

She doesn’t understand it at all.

Ben is silent, rises to his feet and turns his face from her. The bond starts to go dark even as Rey narrows her eyes and pushes, fights to keep it open.

_Damn you, Ben!_ she seethes, kicks against him, as the towering trees and half-finished cabin fade from view, as everything begins to dissipate.

It’s always agony with him, even now, and she muffles a scream into her pillow.

After everything, after Starkiller and Ahch-To and Crait and Snoke and the bond and the twisted, awful way she can’t seem to not care...

_I deserve more than this,_ she spits at his fading silhouette, digs her fingertips into her mattress and screams at him.

There’s something sad and quiet through the bond, a stillness, a surety that takes her aback, leaves her eyes wide as Ben hesitates just for a moment.

_That’s why I’m trying to shut you out._

The bond closes gently this time.

 

* * *

 

Every day becomes testament to a long-sworn truth between them, one that Rey bares teeth towards and holds fiercely beneath her breastbone, one that Ben has long since accepted and understood.

Rey is so much stronger than he could ever be, and stronger still than she knows.

Every day, she reaches out through the bond.

Every day, Ben’s defenses weaken a little more.

It’s wary, cautious, defensive — but she gets through.

Sometimes just for minutes at a time, sometimes just long enough to register fragrant green canopies, the rough fabric of a thin blanket, quiet pain and introspection.

But she gets through.

She begins to follow his thought patterns, the ones Luke and Leia had hoped he would find in the silence of isolation.

There are days when the darkness hovers close, predatory, and Rey stands before him with shoulders back and a fierceness in her gaze, sends him subtle reminders of light through the bond. Sometimes he’s unreachable, deep in meditation, and more than once she finds him in tears.

Other days are hopeless ones, where the bond is awash in pain and regret, and Rey quietly backs away, allows him the space to grieve.

And sometimes, at the brief space where their day cycles overlap, they meet in the rolling darkness of their shared dreamscape, sitting back-to-back, hands barely touching, steady-eyed, holding off the darkness together.

The bond hums.

 

* * *

 

As the weeks turn, it becomes something almost like a routine, something that Rey keeps quiet and hidden, away from prying eyes.

The bond is still quiet, shuttered for most of the day, until Rey reaches out from dusty desert sands into cool forest and he opens for her.

It’s easiest at night, when she’s curled up in bed, away from curious stares and the politics of the healing Resistance, away from Luke’s uncanny senses and Leia’s gentle comfort.

Rey is pleased when she realizes that Ben has begun to note the timing of her contact, and he’s often recumbent, tired from a long day’s work on the cabin when she reaches out.

(She tries not to dwell on the way they’re both calmer, more at ease with the bond sparking to life between them. On what it might mean.)

“I heard from Finn today,” Rey observes quietly one night, her hands clasped over her stomach as she gazes up at the ceiling of her quarters.

There’s a faint whisper of _traitor_ at the back of her mind, but it’s a half-hearted reflex, and she shoots an annoyed glare at Ben through the bond and bats it away.

“Things are healing, he says,” Rey tells him. “The Senate is reassembling with representatives from surviving systems. War tribunals are being convened, refugees resettled.”

“You miss him.” Ben’s voice is deep, still rusty from disuse. She can feel him shift on the hard metal beneath his makeshift bed.

Rey frowns, glances to the powered down holo on her nightstand. “I do,” she says carefully. “But I can’t…” She closes her eyes. “I need him to do what’s best for the galaxy. For himself.”

“Not for you, then.”

“What’s best for him is what’s best for me,” Rey insists. “That’s what friendship is.”

Ben is quiet, and Rey is reminded of his words from before, there towards the beginning.

_That’s why I’m trying to shut you out_.

She’s not ready to consider the possibility of Ben considering what might be best for her.

The possibility of her and Ben Solo being friends.

But there’s something there just the same, something almost amicable, and she tries not to think on it.

_Tell me what your days are like._ His voice is a deep rumble, even through the bond, and she can just barely make out his features in the dim lantern light. _Rey._

Her name sounds so different from every other word he speaks, every time, back to that first time on Ahch-To when she'd reached out to him for comfort and, to her surprise, he'd offered it openly.

She tries not to think on that, either.

_Meditation, often,_ she sends through the bond, glancing to the bolted door of her quarters and half-turning to the wall, just in case. _I’ll never be a Jedi, I know that, but Luke still wants me to harness the Force. I see…_ She hesitates. _I see your mother more often than not. She’s busy, but she cares._

Something dark roils through the bond, and she reaches out, pushes it aside even as Ben scowls at her.

_How do you keep yourself occupied, other than your cabin?_ she asks, plucking at a stray thread on her bedspread. _How do you stand it, the quiet?_

Mental shutters are slammed down, but not before she catches a glimpse of rolling pain, the kind that brings him to his knees, broken memories, an overwhelming wash of guilt and bone-deep regrets.

Rey bites her lip and curls in on herself more tightly.

This, she knows, is why Luke and Leia had wanted their bond closed. Ben fairly radiates grief, and she feels it right alongside him, feels the somehow-natural urge to comfort, even as she knows, keenly, how crucial it is for him to work through the heavy press of guilt that his actions have finally wrought.

She feels a swell of pity for him, this lost, broken creature, and it seeps through the bond before she realizes what she’s done.

She feels Ben’s responding anger, his eyes narrowed, shoulders raised defensively as he turns his back to her and pushes.

_I don’t need your pity._ It’s furious, lashed out across the stars, and she can almost feel Arbooine shake with the force of it.

_Sympathy isn’t pity,_ Rey pushes back, and she can’t help it, it’s always crackling anger and sparking tension between them, and she wonders when, if ever, they’ll finally find peace.

_Is this why you’ve been following me? Skulking along the bond and tearing through the stars to find me, to torment me with your simpering pity, shake your head and lament my fate?_

_You know it’s not._

_Go back to your own mind and **stay there**._

He’s quick to shut the bond, so quick that Rey can only just barely feel him, and she gasps as she feels pain all over, stinging wounds along her shoulders, her ribs, her abdomen before she’s severed from him.

She quickly switches on the lights in her quarters, takes inventory of her body in her hazy reflection in the transparisteel, but finds only smooth, unbroken skin.

She raises her eyes to the moon, wraps her arms around herself, and stares, unblinking, past the horizon.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t realize that she’s fallen asleep until she blinks once, twice, and finds herself in a fragrant, sunkissed meadow, tall grasses twined with snowblossoms and everlilies.

Ben stands at the edge of it, his back to her, reaching down to pluck what she recognizes as a Jakku weedy spinebarrel from a tangled thatch of briars.

“Adding your own touches to this place, I see,” he notes. His voice sounds fuller, more at ease. “I remember it from when I was young. Ten, maybe eleven. Rough-housing with friends. Feeling the wind, the sun.”

Rey steps towards him, and he turns to face her but does not meet her gaze.

“I think that was the last time I was happy,” he murmurs.

He’s clutching the spinebarrel in one hand, and Rey tries and fails to tamp back the sudden rise of anger that blossoms in her chest. It hovers at the edge of the darkness, but she can’t help it, imagining the boy that had been Ben Solo running through a fragrant meadow with a cheeky grin.

She would have been just born then, to parents who hadn’t wanted her, who would abandon her to the hot sands of Jakku, to a lifetime of loneliness, of hunger, of waiting in vain to be remembered, loved.

“You chose your path.” The words fall from Rey’s lips like hot stones, and oh, she’s so tired _,_ of him, of everything. “Even with Snoke in your ear, even with the blood of the Sith and the Jedi in your veins, even with Luke's last push to the darkness, you chose to become Kylo Ren.”

“You haven’t felt it,” he growls. “That call to the darkness.”

“The hell I haven’t!” The meadow trembles around them in the dreamscape, spots of black appearing at the horizon. She moves to stand toe-to-toe with the specter of Kylo Ren, eyes burning up into his. “I’ve felt it so much more than you’ll ever realize,” she says, and her voice is thick with venom, with pain. “On Starkiller, telling me to slice you open in the snow. On Crait, when I wanted to blast you from the sky and watch you burn. At your trial, when…” She closes her eyes, swallows hard. “I remembered everything you’ve done _,_ and something in me wanted things to turn out differently, even as I fought for you.”

She opens her eyes, narrows them and grasps his chin in one hand, forces him to meet her gaze as he tries to look away.

“I’ve had to fight my whole life,” she seethes. “Jakku has no sympathy for the weak. You claw your way through to another morning or you die in the sand. One moment of weakness, one step back, and there’d be no Force, no destiny, nothing. Nothing but forgotten bones in the sinking fields.”

“You were waiting for a family who cared for you,” he spits, pulls roughly away from her. “You had a fool's hope that you were loved.”

“You had more than hope!” The earth is splitting open around them, the air crackling, and she’s burning with rage. “You were loved every single minute of your life! Your family loved you!”

“I know! _”_ he rages, and Rey staggers back from the force of it. “And I _killed_ them!”

Something breaks in him, and the world seems to tilt, waver, then settle, and they’re back in the green meadow, a soft summer sun, a gentle breeze.

Ben is pale, eyes unfocused, trembling violently. The bond is wild with vivid flashes of memory, all tumbled together, and it’s all Rey can do to hold on in the face of a boy’s high-pitched laughter, the wrinkles at the corners of Han’s eyes as he smiles, intercut with black robes and red sabers and a body tumbling down.

She starts as Ben falls into her arms, and she wraps them tightly around his shoulders, allows him to cling to her as her heart beats wildly and her hands tremble.

“Ben,” she manages, and her voice breaks.

His arms come tight around her as the meadow starts to fade into shifting shadows, as the dreamscapes begin to break.

“You still have family,” Rey tells him, frantic as everything begins to dissipate, and she clutches him to her. “Luke and Leia fought with everything they had to save your life, they want you back more than anything _,_ Ben, they do. Please believe me, please hold on a little while longer.”

Almost gone now, the faintest hint of light, the faintest shape of him still in her arms.

_And you have me,_ she thinks. _For better or worse, until the bond fails, you have me._

There’s a pause, a rigidity to his hold.

And then, as the dream fades from view, as she’s once more turned over to the deep emptiness of her sleeping mind, there’s a brief brush of lips against her temple, so faint she can barely feel it.

Rey shuts down the bond with a gasp.

When she wakes, her eyes are wide, heart pounding, and her skin seems to burn.

 

* * *

 

“You seem tired, Rey.”

Leia’s voice is soft with concern as Rey enters the command room, clutching a cup of caf, dark circles beneath her eyes.

“Didn’t sleep well,” she mutters. She sips her caf, her eyes flicking up to the shifting screens.

“Haven’t been sleeping well for a few weeks now, I think.”

Rey starts, nearly spilling her caf as she notices Luke standing near one of the consoles, watching her with inscrutable eyes.

She waits for him to continue, her heart beating near out of her chest.

But he says nothing, merely glances to Leia with a frown.

Rey raises her caf to her lips once again, hand trembling as she waits for Ben’s vitals to appear.

 

* * *

 

Two nights later, she’s nearly asleep when she feels it.

A brief, hesitant brush at the edge of her consciousness. Tentative. Wary.

Rey rolls onto her side, clutches her pillow to her chest and stares through the transparisteel to the Geonosian moons rising red and white over the horizon.

_Rey._

She takes a deep breath, reaches out, lets him in.


	3. Part III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE NOTE: this chapter contains some very dark themes regarding suicide that some readers may find very upsetting and/or triggering. Please be mindful of the tags and read carefully.

_It needs more windows_.

_It has enough windows._

_It needs one that’s south-facing so you can get the most light for windowsill plants. I don’t see a south-facing window._

_That’s because there is no south-facing **wall** , Rey._

Rey rolls her eyes as Ben roughly sands down one of the thick wooden posts at the exterior of his cabin. He’s made considerable progress over the last few months, and Rey has spent much of that time observing through the bond, fascinated by the way a jumbled assortment of planks and logs has begun to form a tidy cabin in the woods.

Albeit with only two walls framed at the moment.

_There’ll be a south-facing wall eventually,_ she observes. _Or were you planning to use a tarp to keep out the worst of the rain?_

“Like the Resistance would send me a tarp,” Ben grumbles, tapping the floor panel beneath him with his boot, seemingly satisfied as it holds. “I consider it an unexpected kindness that they’re still sending food. If you can call three weeks of proteinloaf food.”

Rey spears a pointed look through the bond, sends him the familiar taste of quarter-portions and quick-meal packs, and he grimaces.

"Fine. Point taken."

_Let me see your plans again,_ Rey thinks to him, and she can feel Ben sigh before he sends her the visual of his hand-drawn schematics, laid out in a far more careful hand than she would have imagined of him on scraps of dusty Old Republic paper.

_There,_ she thinks, mentally highlighting a simple square drawn into the farthest wall. _You’ll want a sill on this one. Give something space and light to grow._

_You’re quite particular about plants for someone from a desert world._

Rey is quiet, watching him dust his hands off and straighten. He winces as he stretches the muscles in his lower back.

“When I was on Jakku,” she says after a moment, “I would collect spinebarrels and nightbloomers, keep them in my AT-AT. It was hopeful, somehow. That something could grow even there in the badlands. I always thought it would be nice to have a garden one day, once, well, once my family came back and we left Jakku together.”

She folds her knees to her chest. There’s a rocky outcrop not far from the Resistance base on Geonosis, looking out onto the rolling deserts, and she’s taken to climbing it in the evenings, staring out to the horizon, trying to carve out something close to home.

_I can’t imagine a ‘nightbloomer’ needs a lot of sun._

Rey shrugs. “They’re nocturnal. Hardy little plants. Don’t need much attention to grow or thrive. They rise from nothing, really. I’ve found them sprouting from cracked rocks, bone-dry earth. They’re survivors, against all the odds.”

She closes her eyes and plucks the visual of Ben’s surroundings from the bond, cool air and mist, the warmth of a midday sun. _You could probably raise something a bit gentler there, I’d imagine._

_Or kill it._ There’s something dark and muted to Ben’s thought, and Rey frowns, opens her mouth to say something in protest.

The schematics flash into her mind once more, and she can see, there on the south-facing window, a small lip on its lower lintel, a haphazard arrow, and then, in a light, halting hand:

_‘For the nightbloomer.’_

 

* * *

 

The Geonosian dust plains disappear beneath the roaring swell of an encompassing sandstorm that drives all base activity inside or underground for nearly a week’s time.

Rey is no stranger to this kind of roiling storm, having huddled in her AT-AT against the harsh, gritty winds and thundering roar of the _X'us'R'iia_ since before she could remember.

But Jakku’s storms were familiar in a way that the ones lashing Geonosis are not, and by the fourth day, even meditation cannot still her restlessness, her desire to be out.

Ben finds her through the bond as she lies in bed, feels the wind howling like a beek-monkey beyond the transparisteel.

_What?_ she snaps at him.

_You’re in a fine mood, I see._ She can feel sticky sap on his hands, beads of sweat rolling down his back, and knows he must have just come from work on the cabin.

She closes her eyes and sighs. _Sandstorms. It's strange how I lived through them all my life, and now I can’t bear it._

The bond sparks with her anxiousness, disquiet, irritation. Rey is tired and ill-rested, and she sits up in bed, rests her head in her hands.

Nearly five months on Geonosis.

_“_ Nothing’s holding you here, Rey _,”_ Leia had told her just a few weeks earlier, when she’d caught Rey gazing up at the stars, before the horizon was obscured by dust and the moons fell behind the shifting sands. _“_ I didn’t send you to Coruscant as part of Finn’s delegation out of fear it might be too overwhelming for you with — well, with everything else. _”_ There had been a brief flash of pain across the general’s features. “But that avenue is open to you. As is anything else.”

She knows this. She does.

She could seek her peace throughout the galaxy, take up in the _Falcon_ and explore the worlds beyond the stars she hasn’t even seen on charts, taste the wilds and chase the clouds. She could meditate on mountaintops, deep-dive through ocean caves, tend sprawling gardens rich with cloudflower vines and ironwithe.

_Then why don’t you? You weren’t sentenced to exile with me, Rey._

Rey’s eyes widen as she realizes how open her thoughts are, how she’s bled every wild image into the bond.

She can feel Ben’s discomfit, the way he stalks through the forest back to the base, and she huddles in as a sharp, heavy gust of wind rattles the transparisteel.

He’s angry for her, and it’s as confusing as everything else is.

She doesn’t know how to tell him that she knows what it’s like to realize no one is waiting.

That he’d promised he’d return, and that she won’t, can’t leave him alone.

That somehow, even now, nothing still quite feels like home, but this thing between them, the rolling depths of the bond, the anchor across the stars feels so close.

She feels rain.

Rey gasps, strokes a thumb over her forehead, over her brow, tracing the phantom raindrop along her — along  _Ben_ _’s —_ skin. _Is it raining there?_

_Yes. Kriff._ She feels Ben duck his head and quicken his pace, feels the dot of raindrops along his skin.

It doesn’t rain on Geonosis, on Jakku.

She aches for it, the idea that water can fall from the sky, and oh, how she had reveled in it on Ahch-To, in those brief months where everything that mattered to her all shattered into free-fall.

_Wait,_ she thinks through the bond, as Ben stills at the entrance to the abandoned base. _Wait._

He doesn’t say anything, but she feels him take a deep breath before pushing away from the corroded metal, moving back into the forest.

There’s a sudden flare through the bond, and it’s as if she can see what he sees, feel what he feels.

Towering green-leafed trees sluicing rainwater to the forest floor, sweet and fresh. Sucking mud and squirming earthworms. The silver-gray shore of a curving lake, raindrops spattering against its churning surface.

She feels Ben fall back against the spongy grass, feels rain against his skin, against hers, cool pinpoints, soaking through.

The heated winds of the sandstorm still roar outside on Geonosis, but she’s transported somehow, feels herself beside Ben in the grass, rain-slicked and cold, wet fingertips just barely touching.

_I hate the rain,_ Ben grouses.

Rey laughs, closes her eyes and _feels_.

 

* * *

 

The dust storms finally dissipate into the roiling heat of a searing midday sun, and Rey once more ventures out to the periphery of the base. There are great rolling sand dunes shifted high above the rocky outcrops and ridges from the storm winds, but she finds a flat rise several meters past them, curls up in the shade of a skinny, brown-limbed Cydorrian driller tree.

The Resistance base is swarming with activity after news of General Armitage Hux's capture — a particularly hard-nosed bounty hunter had discovered him attempting to blend into the civilian population on Tatooine, seeking passage to a sympathetic system. Leia herself is dispatched to negotiate a price for his transfer into Resistance custody.

_They didn't set a high enough bounty for that weasel-faced toady outright?_ Ben asks after Rey tells him.

"I don't think that was the problem," Rey notes. Her legs are crossed comfortably, back up against the driller tree, her eyes narrowed in concentration as she digs grains of sand out of her saber hilt. "The price was very generous, from what I've heard, but Hux didn't go easily. Got a few good hits in on the bounty hunter, said something about her mother being a Hutt. Apparently we got an urgent communiqué from Mos Eisley asking if the 'must be captured intact and alive' directive was still valid if he'd had a few teeth knocked out."

Rey's eyes widen as she hears Ben laugh through the bond, and she can see a lightness in his eyes, a mischievous grin that makes him look so much younger, so much more at peace than she's ever seen him before.

She wonders if that's what Ben Solo had looked like, before.

Her heart beats faster.

 

* * *

 

Rey has no indication that anyone on the base suspects anything.

Ben's vital signs hold steady. The transports depart for their remote drops every six weeks, right on schedule.

(Rey occasionally sees one of the tribunal members in the command room, looking carefully at the read-outs, and makes herself scarce.)

Rey herself is granted every bit of freedom she wishes, and she finds quiet corners of the base for meditation, explores the dust-swept Geonosian plains, climbs ridges and rappels down through canyons. Sometimes she practices saber forms in the base gym. At night, more often than not she curls up wide-awake in her bunk, watches the moon rise and settles into what is becoming disturbingly easy and comfortable conversation with Ben.

Luke glances at her sidelong every once in awhile, when he asks how her meditation is progressing, but says nothing.

And as much as Rey loves her, it's easier with Leia off-world for a few days, easier to hold the bond open and allow this thing between her and Ben to continue building.

_Fresh bluefruit._

_Finding speeder parts after a long day's work._

_Summers on Naboo._

_The waves crashing on Ahch-To. Cool air and seawater._

Rey is lying on her back on a crest near the base, hands folded over her stomach, gazing up at the stars, the rising moons. She'd heard word around the base of a meteor shower, and occasionally a streak of silver cuts across the ink-black night sky.

_Your turn,_ she says to Ben. It had been her idea to take turns naming things that they missed, after a trying afternoon where he'd been taciturn and brooding, holding her at arm's length for the first time in weeks.

Ben is quiet. She can feel his unrest, the rough scrape of bark against his back as he pulls his knees to his chest. He's looking out onto the lake she'd seen before, and there's a cool breeze across the water.

He's not sleeping well, and he looks discomfited, shoulders hunched, eyes hooded.

_There's so much I miss,_ he says finally. _So much I don't deserve to._

Rey sighs, attempts to send a gentle thread of comfort through the bond only to feel him bristle and bat her away. He's in one of his moods.

"Does that planet have any plant life that you could distill into something to help you sleep?" Rey asks. Her voice is quiet, but it still carries just a bit farther than she'd like in the night desert air.

She can hear Ben's responding scoff of laughter. _I'm sure, with my extensive knowledge of the native flora and fauna of arboreal systems, I can brew up something that would, if nothing else, kill me quickly._

Rey scowls in irritation. _That's not funny._

She can feel a hint of contrition, but Ben says nothing.

_If nothing else, you could always check a dat..._

She trails off, biting the inside of her lip. Right. He had no datapads, no holos, let alone access to the HoloNet.

_I think I miss that the most,_ she hears him say, and there's a quiet introspection to it that she's still not used to. _Datapads. Reading. Even with..._

Rey can feel him quickly suppress the words "the First Order," the visual memory of stark, silver-black quarters on a Star Destroyer.

_I always liked reading. Especially at night. It settled things, back when nothing was settled, never felt like it could be._

_Is that why you're not sleeping well? Not having anything to read?_

She feels him hesitate, sees glimpses of the red-tinged nightmares he's screamed through the bond for the past week. _Not entirely._

Rey frowns, drumming her fingertips against her abdomen before a thought strikes her. _Come on,_ she thinks through the bond, rising to her feet and heading back to base.

_Rey, I'm quite a number of systems away. I'm not actually going anywhere with you._

_Shut up._

* * *

 

Rey has become something of a voracious reader in her downtime on base through the last two years — she's eager, hungry for knowledge, and devours every scrap of it she can find.

The base is home to a small but well-kept library — no doubt Leia's doing, Rey thinks with a small smile — and it's late, but the door opens easily to Rey's data card.

_What are you doing, exactly?_

_Finding you something to read,_ Rey thinks, absently skimming the available datapads for something that might catch his interest. _Do you have a preference?_

Ben sends a short, barking laugh through the bond. _Yes, an anthology of the last century of Coruscanti poetry and a glass of Corellian wine to pair._

_Kriffing nerf-herder._

"Can I help you?"

Rey jumps, scattering half a dozen datapads from a nearby shelf as an older woman in fatigues appears behind her, appraising her through thick-framed glasses.

"I—" Rey starts, struggling to pick up the fallen datapads, "I was having trouble sleeping and just wanted something to read. You know. To fall asleep."

She grabs one of the datapads blindly and holds it up. "This one. Right here."

"Okay," the woman says slowly, "and did you want that to—"

"Go, yes, very busy here on base, much to do with everything going on. I'm friends with General Organa, you know, very important woman, just going to take this and get out of your way then." Rey knows she's babbling as she tucks the datapad in against her side, quickly slipping from the library as the woman stares after her in befuddlement.

_Smooth._ She can almost see Ben's mocking smirk.

_Bite the hand that feeds you and you can go the rest of your sentence without reading a word,_ Rey snipes at him as she sneaks into her quarters, bolting the door behind her.

Ben sighs through the bond, and she can feel him shift, settling into a more comfortable position. _Fine. What are we reading?_

Rey sits on her bunk and powers up the datapad, her heart sinking.

"’Maintaining Your Class-1 Antimatter Hyperdrive Motivator: Volume 3, Null Quantum Field Generators _,’"_ she reads.

Ben is silent.

Then:

_Fascinating._

Rey bites back a curse, sighing and setting the datapad to one side. _Sorry. I was just trying to grab something. Can you wait until tomorrow night?_

_I didn't say I didn't want you to read it._

Rey raises a curious eyebrow and gently probes through the bond, but his emotions are shut off to her. All she can see is his stiff posture in the dim silver light of Arbooine's distant moon, the gentle lapping of the lake at its nearby shore.

After a moment, she tucks herself in against the wall beside her bunk and begins to read.

"Thank you for purchasing the third in Alluvian Publishing's series of hyperdrive support materials. This latest edition provides troubleshooting for all Class-I models in addition to back-gen Class II and Class III. For information about the recent Class 0.75 modifications, we invite you to purchase our supplemental datapad, available at..."

And so it goes, pages upon pages of technical language, dry as the Geonosian dust plains.

Rey reads until her throat is parched, until her eyelids droop, until even she, a dyed-in-the-wool connoisseur of starship specifications, is overwhelmed and exhausted.

She searches the bond, sure that Ben must be long-asleep.

Instead, he's deathly still, silent and somber, staring out at the lake.

_Ben?_ Rey asks. She sets the datapad aside, eyes him quizzically. _Are you all right?_

_My father._ There's a pained shudder through the bond, and Rey herself nearly shakes from the force of it. _He... he wasn't around very often, you know. Couldn't be bothered with his difficult son, never wanted kids, didn't want to deal with it._

Rey closes her eyes, sees Han's face in those last moments, bathed in red light. _Ben_ _. Stop._

_One night, when I was little, maybe three or four, he had me on the Falcon,_ he continues as if she hasn't spoken. _I had nightmares back then too, except I didn't even know where they were coming from, not yet. He set me up in the pilot's bunk, said he'd read me a story to send me off to sleep. 'Kids like stories,' he said. But obviously he wasn't exactly much of a reader, couldn't be bothered with that, either._

Ben is quiet, still, and Rey feels him exhale on a shaky breath.

_So he read me what he had, an old collection of Corellian freighter schematics. Just sat there and read me the technical specifications of every single ship he'd salvaged and scavenged over the years._

She can feel him crying.

_Nine hours. I fell asleep, woke up, again and again. One nightmare, two. Three. And he just sat there, reading. Held my hand._

Ben's head is in his hands, and he's hunched over, crying in earnest.

_I loved him so much, Rey. I did. Even though he never..._

The bond is running thick with his emotions, the heavy sobs that he can't bring himself to vocalize shuddering through, and even though Rey has found herself projected to him on Arbooine more than a few times, this is the first time that she feels him here beside her, his broad shoulders shaking as she wraps her arms around him, tucks his head under her chin.

_He loved you, too,_ she thinks to him, strokes a hand through his hair, and her own cheeks are damp. _He did. Right up to the last._

They're both crying, and it's strange how easy it feels now to hold him, to press her cheek to his, to feel his hands splayed against her back and pull her closer.

They've never really touched outside of the dreamscape, outside of the hazy projections that the bond allows, but everything feels so real, like Ben is actually here with her, and her heart pounds a rapid beat in her chest as Rey realizes that she wants him to be.

_Rey._ Her name sounds almost broken, and she clings to him, shushes him.

_I'm here,_ she thinks, dizzy from the overwhelming roll of grief through the bond, the way Ben's arms are tight around her, the frantic beating of her heart, the way she can't seem to stop crying and she doesn't even understand why or how she'd started.

_I'm here._

* * *

 

Rey wakes with stiff, heavy limbs and sleep-crusted eyes, her quarters just beginning to brighten in the blue-violet dawn of early morning.

She moves to stretch, only to find herself framed beside something solid. She freezes, registers an arm slung warmly over her shoulders, her head tucked against a broad chest, her legs tangled with a pair far longer than her own.

She slowly tips her head back and registers Ben curled in close around her, one hand splayed against her lower back.

As the feeling, the images within the bond begin to fade with her waking, as she once more finds herself alone in a hard bunk, sheets askew and damp with sweat, Rey realizes, belatedly, that she has never seen Ben look so peaceful.

And that she has never slept so well.

 

* * *

 

They skirt the edge of each other's consciousnesses for most of the following day, not quite touching, not quite breaching the bond.

Rey peeks through once or twice, retreats quickly when she sees Ben, tight-jawed and tense, swinging an axe down onto an upturned stump and splitting logs.

(It's less the downward swing, reminiscent of the dark Knight of Ren with his cruel saber strikes, that makes her dart from the bond so much as it is his state of undress. He's bare-chested, sweaty and tousled, jaw set in determination, and it makes her feel something that she doesn't even want to begin to approach.)

Rey, for her part, makes her daily trip to the command room, caf in hand, only to attempt a hasty retreat when she recognizes several of the tribunal members in heated conversation with Leia.

"He should be in far worse shape by now," the blue-skinned Squamatan hisses.

Leia is unfazed. "Forgive me, Captain Javos, but I was unaware that any detrimental effects to the prisoner's well-being were a part of his sentence."

"He appears to be thriving, general. This is a punishment?"

Leia's eyes flicker briefly to Rey as she sidles closer to the exit. "You'll forgive me, captain," Leia says, her voice deceptively light as she comes to Rey's side, takes her elbow in a firm grip. "I'd forgotten that Rey had asked to speak with me once I was back on-world. We can continue this conversation later this afternoon." She affords the Squamatan a pointed stare. "At my convenience."

The Squamatan scowls in annoyance, looking back to the flashing vidscreens, but says nothing.

Rey can only stare at Leia in confusion as the general steers her from the command room. "Head down. Stay quiet," Leia says to her between gritted teeth as they walk quickly to her quarters. "We need to talk away from prying eyes and ears."

Rey nods, silently reaching through the bond and offering a muted apology to Ben as she slides it shut.

 

* * *

 

"They're not happy."

Rey worries her lower lip between her teeth as Leia steeples her hands and rests her chin against them at her desk. "Small wonder," she says. "They wanted him dead outright."

"No, Rey." Leia sighs, scrubs a hand over her face. "They wanted him to suffer _,_ in whatever form that might take. A slow death fit the bill, but so did madness from isolation."

Rey feels the familiar icy slice down her spine she had felt that day in the sentencing room six months earlier. "Push him to breaking by placing him in solitary confinement and allowing him no diversions," she says quietly. "That was the plan."

Leia nods, somber. "That was the deal we set in exchange for staying his execution." She hesitates before activating the holo on her desk, deftly typing in several codes. "He's not breaking the way they thought he would."

"What exactly did they expect? A total mental collapse? The silence turning him into a crying, jibbering mess?"

Leia purses her lips as the holo activates — it's an audio-only feed, black static within the viewfield.

Rey stares at her, uncomprehending, until she hears it.

"Like the Resistance would send me a tarp." Ben's voice, deep with annoyance, and she recalls their conversation from several weeks earlier. "I consider it an unexpected kindness that they’re still sending food. If you can call three weeks of proteinloaf food. _”_

There's a long silence through the feed, broken only by the sound of sanding.

"Fine. Point taken."

Leia is staring at her, something inscrutable in her gaze.

"It's almost like he's talking to himself," she says. "The tribunal members have listened to the full audio from his exile — more power to them, I could barely stand to listen to the excerpts — and they're baffled. They say it sounds like one half of a conversation, but they can't find any evidence that the communication shields on Arbooine have been compromised. No signals are getting near that planet. There's no way he could be talking to anyone unless it's all — well. 'In his mind' was their wording."

Rey shifts uncomfortably in her seat.

She can't meet Leia's eyes.

"He sounds almost content, they said," Leia continues. She pauses for a moment. "More at-ease."

"Yes," Rey whispers. She notes Leia's piercing stare. "I mean, on the audio, at least," she amends quickly.

Leia is silent, leaning back in her chair.

Rey wrings her hands together in her lap, waiting for Leia to vocalize what they both seem to know.

_I'm sorry,_ she thinks. _I didn't mean for this to happen. I didn't mean to._

But she had.

She had sought Ben out, time and again, even as Luke and Leia forbade her to.

She'd forced her way through the bond.

She'd kept it open.

She'd let him get close.

And worse, she'd found herself...

"Rey."

She raises her eyes to the general's, is startled to find them brimming with tears, with hope.

"Please just tell me if he's okay."

There's a roughness to her voice, and in that moment, the steel-backed senator, the sharp-eyed general is gone, and there is only a heartsick mother still hoping for her son's safe return.

Rey finds herself reaching across the desk, taking Leia's hands in hers, finally meeting her gaze.

"I think he will be," she whispers.

 

* * *

 

Rey doesn't dip into the bond for the rest of the day, until she's safely curled up in her bunk with the thin blankets pulled up to her chin.

She'd been called to the command room shortly after her meeting with Leia. The tribunal members had been assembled, and Rey had barely managed to keep her face impassive as they played her seemingly every word Ben had spoken aloud thus far on Arbooine.

Her heart had hammered against her ribcage, fingertips twitching with an overwhelming desire to subtly shade minds and erase memories as she listened, hoping against hope that Ben hadn't said her name _._

But they must have known, instinctively, to be subtle in their conversations, she and Ben, no names or direct address played back through the audio feed. Ben has spoken very little, seems to prefer the quiet privacy of the bond, and the snippets of speech gleaned from surveillance sound like a man driven to the edge of sanity by isolation, holding conversations with himself.

Rey had offered the tribunal a small smile before dismissing herself.

Now, lying in her bunk, staring up at the ceiling, she hopes that they haven't been surveilling her _._

She's been a bit more careless than Ben has, she knows, and she huddles into the covers, thinks of the times she's spoken aloud just to hear that her voice still functions.

She likes the way his name sounds when it's spoken in friendship rather than brutal hostility.

She likes the way he speaks her name far more.

Rey frowns, hesitating as she brushes mental fingers against the edge of the bond. Those thoughts have been cropping up far more frequently of late, she's noticed.

But it’s true.

He never says her name lightly, the way everyone else seems to, dropped into the easy rhythm of conversation, paired with a smile and an acknowledging nod.

It's always so much more, somehow. Heavier.

_Rey._ Awed and near-frightened, that first time through the bond, a disbelieving whisper.

_Rey._ Screamed, desperate, across the flaming battlefield of Snoke's throne room.

_Rey._ Soft, teasing, easy and familiar these last few months, like her name belongs on his tongue.

_Rey._

She feels it through the bond as she opens it, stares through to a cool, misty Arbooine afternoon, but Ben is nowhere to be found.

Rey frowns, carefully searches the places she usually finds him: the sylvan clearing of his half-finished cabin, the silvered lake shore, the rolling wooded hills along the spine of the horizon.

Nothing.

There's a sharp spike of fear in the pit of her stomach. Months now, and she's never known him to be unreachable here at their usual meeting time.

Rey makes a beeline for the abandoned Rebellion base that serves as his shelter in exile, ducks beneath hanging wires and rusted durasteel, a swell of relief washing over her as she recognizes Ben's Force signature, steady and strong.

His thoughts are shielded from her, but weakly, something trembling and faint barely holding them together.

Rey furrows her brow in concern, moves deeper into the base as she hears him, a deep, guttural, strangled noise.

_Nightmares_. She sighs, eyes the markers along hallways she recognizes from his side of the bond, nearing the space she knows he's carved out for his makeshift bunk. 

She feels a dull pain deep through her chest at the thought that he'd shut her out from him now, with nightmares rolling through his sleeping mind, when they'd stood together through so many of them, when...

Rey bites her lip, pauses.

The memory of the previous night returns to her in a rush, how warm she'd felt in the tight circle of his arms, how placid and content his features had been in sleep.

Maybe they'd crossed a line they shouldn't have. Maybe he wasn't entirely wrong in placing some reasonable distance between them.

Rey hesitates a moment longer at the edge of the small space she knows contains his bunk.

Maybe she should give him his space. Give herself space as well, to untangle all of the frankly confusing thoughts that seem to tumble about these days, not entirely unpleasant but still unsettling in the way they seem to...

Something shifts in the darkness, and she sees him.

Ben is lying back in his bunk, bare skin shadowed and golden in the dim lantern light, one hand fisted tightly in his hair.

The other...

Oh.

_Oh_.

Rey flushes down to her toes, cheeks flaring hot as Ben vocalizes another strangled moan.

Well.

Not a nightmare, then.

He doesn't seem to have noticed her, and Rey raises her eyes in mute thanks to the heavens and silently steps backwards, fully intending to break from the base in a hard mental sprint. _Let us never speak of this, this never happened, stop staring, Rey, it's a perfectly normal urge._

" _Rey_."

She freezes.

The world seems to stop, everything in her numb, dazed, and she slowly turns back.

The lantern light seems brighter somehow, and she can see the way Ben's spine seems to arch off his bunk, his bare chest rising and falling as he pants, arching up into his grasping hand.

Oh gods.

She can't even try to run, can't stumble back as the bond cracks open, and she feels, sees.

_There_ , the wrinkle of her nose when she laughs, the spread of freckles across her cheeks, and _beautiful, how are you this beautiful, desert girl_

The phantom touch of her hand across the stars, a desperate recoil, _I don't deserve you, your sympathy, turn and run, Rey, please_

The hope, the yearning that burns at the edges of his grief, the way he watches the tracking moon and his eyes spark to life when she calls.

And the soft wonder in them as she sleeps curled in his arms the night before, her breath deep and even, and he shifts her closer, watches and holds, and she can feel roiling lust warring with something far deeper, feels fingertips ghosting reverent against her temple and _worth it, just for this, for you._

Rey gasps, hands flying to her mouth, before she can help herself.

Ben goes deathly still, and the light seems to dim, flicker wildly.

_Rey?_

She slams the bond shut, raises her mental walls and lies back in her bunk, stares up at the ceiling with wide eyes, heart beating a rapid tattoo in her chest.

When Ben reaches out to her, minutes later, she holds the bond closed.

She does not sleep.

 

* * *

 

Ben reaches out to her several times a day for the next three weeks.

Rey keeps the bond shut, heart jumping every time she feels him brush alongside it.

She can still feel the press of his emotions gathering at the edge of the shuttered bond, even through her mental walls. There is contrition, apology. Fear. Self-loathing.

But she can't bear to see him yet. Can't speak to him.

Not yet, not now, not knowing what she knows.

Rey drops her head down onto her arms as she lies stretched out on her stomach on her familiar ridge, the desert winds whistling gently around her.

_You knew_ , a traitorous part of her thinks. _You've always known._

And she had.

Deep down, she had.

From the first moments on Starkiller, the awe in his eyes, his desperate entreaties to teach her, to what had felt like the end, there in Snoke's throne room, Ben braced on hand and knee above her, bleeding and wincing in pain, weathering blows and bearing the wrath of his master as his eyes burned fire into hers.

He was attracted to her. Cared for her, even, in his own way, something that had started as blunted compassion and begrudging respect for a familiar Force-sensitive blossoming and deepening through the bond, through a slowly-building mutual understanding, through growing closeness and ease.

She curls in on herself as she feels Ben attempt to breach the bond again, lighter now after all these weeks, half-hearted.

Rey doesn't know what she feels.

She has grown fond of him. This she knows, sees little point in continued denial now. Her heart swells when she sees the hint of a smile in his dark, troubled eyes. She likes the way he seems to know so many things, shares bits and pieces of what had been a promising life spent traversing the galaxy, before it had turned to darkness and regret.

And although a part of her still hates it, this thing anchored between them, binding them together, the bond keeps him closer to her than she has ever felt to another living person, bone to bone, blood to blood, two halves of a powerful, Force-strung whole. Balanced.

She misses him.

May the Force damn her and strike her down, but she misses him.

Rey hesitates before reaching out tentatively through the bond, frowning when Ben's Force signature seems to slip away from her.

She doesn't know what to say. She's still frightened of what lies between them, still can't put words to it.

But she's run long enough.

_Ben._ She pushes harder, reaches across the stars, only to encounter thick walls, reinforced, impenetrable.

Rey furrows her brow, frowns, pushes, but the walls hold fast.

She can feel dark clouds gathering, feel the skulking thread of darkness that seems to be choking the bond, so tightly that she gasps.

There's a flash of something, ice-blue eyes in a pale, disfigured face, and Rey's eyes widen in fear.

_Ben!_ she fairly screams through the bond, hammers against his mental walls, slips along the edges seeking a way in, a weakness.

The walls hold fast.

Outside, the darkness continues to gather.

 

* * *

 

In the brief moments of sleep she steals from her anxious waking hours, Rey dives headlong into the dreamscape, swims through darkness and searches.

Finds nothing.

After two weeks, the bond runs cold.

 

* * *

 

It's the fourth week of empty silence when Rey wakes with a gasp, clutching at her chest as something sharp seems to spear through her. The pain is searing, agonizing, and she rips the blankets from her bunk, tears her nightshirt through, only to see intact, bloodless skin.

Her blood turns to ice, and she frantically searches the bond, gasping in pain at the empty depth of it. _Ben_ _!_

" _Rey_!"

Leia's frantic voice sounds from the door to her quarters, and Rey winces, presses one hand to the space over her heart and quickly dresses.

Leia is disheveled, pale.

"I need you in the command center," she says, and even though she holds herself steady, her voice shakes. "Now."

 

* * *

 

Rey clings to herself, struggling to take deep, even breaths in the harsh digital light of the command room.

Ben's vital signs flicker from the vid screen in front of her.

He's alive.

Barely.

"You have to intercept him," she hears herself saying, and it's rough-edged, from pain, from exhaustion, from fear. "Send a med team, bring him here and start his exile over, whatever you have to do."

The grizzled Tarsunt observes Rey somberly. Leia stares past her to Ben's vitals with pained eyes.

Luke enters the command room, and Rey can feel him absorb the pained Force signatures in the room, and there's a roll of grief that seems to wash over him.

He settles in a chair at a nearby console, gravely quiet.

"You knew this was a possibility, general," the Tarsunt says. His tone is matter-of-fact, but there's a soft undercurrent of sympathy.

"And I agreed to the conditions," Leia responds softly. "Yes."

Rey tears from the vid screen, wild-eyed. "What conditions?"

The Tarsunt eyes her dispassionately, glancing to Leia. "I recall that you did not remain at the prisoner's sentencing to hear the full terms of his exile, Rey. You might be less confused at the present moment had you chosen otherwise."

Rey narrows her eyes, lips pulling back to bare her teeth, and oh, she'll kill him if he talks to her like that once more, if he doesn't tell her this instant.

"Rey." Luke's voice, soft, warning, and Rey blinks, feels something light and warm settle into her, comforting.

She wants to rip it from her bones and throw it at him.

"If the prisoner—"

"He has a _name._ "

"If the prisoner," the Tarsunt continues, ignoring Rey's outburst, "should suffer injury during his sentence, however grave, the Resistance will not intervene."

Rey's sudden swell of rage seems to fade, her shoulders going slack, blood running cold as his words register.

"Should the worst occur," Leia says, and it's as though the general, once known for her silver tongue and fiery orations in the Senate, can barely speak, "it would be as the Force willed it."

Rey can only stare at her in dawning horror. She turns back to the vid screen, sees the dimming lines of Ben's pulse.

She looks helplessly to Leia, her features pinched tightly with pain; to the stony-faced Tarsunt; to Luke, who seems as gray and taciturn as ever.

There's a scream building in Rey's chest, something desperate and burning, and she stumbles blindly from the command room, barely seeing through eyes gone hot and gritty with tears.

_You promised,_ she screams through the bond, spits it like burning acid across the stars, into the emptiness. _You promised you would come back!_

Another lie, another person gone, another thing taken from her.

"Rey."

She turns, fixes an angry, tearful stare on Leia as the general rushes up to her, takes her into a tight, unyielding embrace.

_Stop,_ Rey thinks desperately, drips tears onto the shoulder of Leia's elegant gown, struggles to move away. _Don't make me face you right now when we failed, we both failed._

"Can you find him?" It's a harsh, desperate whisper at her ear, and Leia's hands are bruising tight against her shoulders. "Rey, please. We haven't got much time."

Rey pulls back just a fraction, blinks in surprise.

"I—" She closes her eyes, shakes her head. "I can't. I tried, and there's... it's empty _,_ Leia. He's shut me out."

Leia reaches up to grasp Rey's chin in her hand, and Rey is surprised by how gentle her grip is. "Can you heal through the Force?" she asks quietly.

Not very well, with her meditation fallen by the wayside over the last few months, her Force powers still raw and untamed, but Rey nods.

"Could you heal through the bond? If you could find him?" Leia's voice is rough with unshed tears, and she looks so frail.

"I don't know." She's crying, damn it, can't help herself, and she lets Leia draw her closer, allows herself to be held and comforted by the one person she knows shares her grief, her fear.

Leia is quiet. "I've spent half my life bearing up under the consequences what the 'Force willed,'" she says after a moment, and there's a deep ferocity to it that seems to rattle the stars. "And I'm sick of it."

She cups Rey's tear-streaked face in her hands, and Rey can see the first tears slip from the general's eyes. "If you can find him," she starts.

Rey lays her hands over Leia's, wills steel and fire into her blood.

She nods.

 

* * *

 

Leia returns to the command room to hold silent vigil.

Rey returns to her quarters, stretches out on her bunk. Moonlight washes over her, cold and distant.

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and slips into the darkness.

 

* * *

 

The bond is weak now, and Rey clings to it with the same ferocious grasp she'd used for a particularly precious scavenged haul, holding fast to what was hers and keeping it safe from prying eyes.

It takes everything she has to dive through it, to chase the silver thread of Ben's consciousness. His walls give easily now, weakened, fading.

And then she's suddenly there, on Arbooine, the sun rising pink and gold along the horizon, the air crisp and green, birds chirping sweetly in the distance.

The bond is fading fast, and she chases it, finds herself in the clearing, half-stumbling over sanded logs and makeshift tools.

Ben is lying curled on his side in a pool of blood, utterly still.

Rey chokes back a sob as she rushes to him, kneels down and takes him into her arms.

She distantly notices a blaster lying a few yards away.

_One shot._

_Just in case._

His eyes are closed, and his pulse flutters weakly beneath her probing fingertips. "I'm sorry I'm late," she manages, her voice choked and thin. She strokes a hand through his hair, comforting, even as she trembles. "Please stay. Just a little longer."

She knows the tribunal members, the whole of the Resistance can probably hear her, echoing across the stars, and she doesn't care.

Ben Solo is hers _._

And she won't let them take him.

Rey has only Force healed on three occasions in her life. Twice for sore, stiff muscles after particularly taxing sparring matches, as she'd ignored Luke's scolding glances, and once, on Crait, when a stormtrooper had sent a blaster bolt through her thigh, and she'd mentally stitched the wound together, just enough to keep fighting, to see the battle to its end before she collapsed and screamed for a bacta patch.

She's never healed anyone else before, not even for a scraped knee, much less a mortal wound. Rey swallows hard as she shifts Ben's prone, unconscious form to one arm, rolling up the edge of his blood-soaked tunic with the other.

It's every bit as awful as she'd expected, a scorching, bloody blaster wound through his chest, and she can't even begin to imagine how he's still alive.

_Because you are_ , something deep within her consciousness supplies, something as deep and as old as the stars. _He's pulling through the bond from your vitality, your strength. But it won't hold much longer, girl. If you want him, best work fast._

Rey closes her eyes, presses one hand to his wound, and lets the Force flow through her.

 

* * *

 

It hurts more fiercely than anything she's ever felt, as the Force leeches from her blood and bones and pours into Ben. She imagines unbroken skin, solid muscle, knitted bones.

But his chest is still just barely rising and falling, his pulse still weak.

The darkness is swirling around him, and she can hear Snoke's mocking laughter, his gentle admonitions.

_Of course she left you, boy. They all did. I was the only one who could ever care for you, and look how you've repaid me. You've done this to yourself._

Rey spits a curse at the darkness, tries to push dispelling light towards it, even as she presses harder against Ben's wound, more frantically, beads of sweat breaking along her brow. _Center. Focus. Feel it flow through you and send it through._

_Of course she didn’t care for you. She left you because of your **weakness** , your deficiency. She left you, didn’t she, boy, everyone leaves you but me, no one **ever** cared for you as I did, yet you threw me away for **her**._

_Stop!_ Rey nearly screams.

It's not working.

She bites back a sob. Her hands are wet with blood, Ben heavy in her arms, and she presses her forehead to his.

He's so cold.

_Fresh bluefruit,_ she thinks to him, through the fading clasp of the bond. She can feel the Force humming through her veins, feels it bleeding into him. _Summers on Naboo._

She clutches him closer, allows the Force to flow as she struggles to keep her sobs in check, sends gleaned images through the space between them.

Soaking rain and glancing fingertips.

Leia's tight embraces.

Han's crooked grin, _a little harder there, sport._

Datapads and holos.

Fragrant silver-green winds in a grassy meadow.

Nightbloomers.

A broken, healing man, the exhausted young woman in his arms, something full and warm sparking between them.

_You promised_. Rey can feel herself break on the words, a lifetime of abandonment and loneliness crashing down around her as she holds Ben's inert frame closer. _You can't leave. Not just when I've gotten you._

He's still cold. Silent. Motionless.

Rey closes her eyes.

She's not sure if the searing pain through her chest is a residual from the blaster wound or from the hollow, bleeding space it feels as though her heart has been ripped through.

She sends a broken apology to Leia.

She presses her palm more tightly to his wound, noses at his temple.

It's a foolish thing, she knows, thinks of the starry-eyed holos she's watched in secret, but...

Rey hesitates, leans down, brushes her lips over Ben's in a brief, faint kiss. Lingers.

She jolts as the Force pulses beneath her palm, as the faint fluttering of a heartbeat grows louder, as she feels something stitch together, a deep, ragged wound in the Force slowly softening.

The darkness around them shudders, sparks. Fades.

Rey's eyes widen as one pale, shaky hand rises to rest against her hair, as the bond begins to hum, as warming lips press more firmly to her own.

She draws back, just enough to rest her forehead against Ben's, to press her teary cheek to his. His heart is beating beneath her fingertips, stronger by the second, and she can feel the bond sparking back to life.

He's disoriented at first, trying to pull from her embrace.

When his eyes finally focus, when they settle on her face, her teary smile, the hand at her hair moves, chases a tear with one knuckle.

The bond is thick, bright with emotion, and Rey barely has time to brace herself before Ben has risen into a sitting position, his hands roughly cupping her face, lips crashed to hers.

_Rey,_ she hears through the bond, half-broken, delirious, and she closes her eyes and kisses him harder.

_Yes,_ she thinks.

Yes, she wants him.

 

* * *

 

Ben is still weakened, leans heavily against Rey's supporting shoulders as she leads him gingerly to his bunk within the abandoned base.

"You're not really here," he says, but there's a question in his voice as she lays him back, strokes a hand across his cheek.

"I'm not. But I came a long way for you," Rey murmurs, lowers herself to sit beside him. She can't seem to stop touching him, fingers ghosting along the inside of his forearm, his shoulder, his collarbone. "Rather impolite of you to nearly die in the middle of it."

Ben is quiet, catching her questing fingertips and loosely holding her wrist. "I thought you were gone," he says quietly. "After. When you. Saw."

He's flushed, and even now, with Ben just back from the brink of death and herself utterly spent, she can't help but crook the barest hint of a grin at him.

"It took over. He took over. Not that he's still in there, I don't think, but." Ben sighs angrily, scrubs a hand across his face. "That poison runs deep. And when you ran, when you closed the bond, that voice, what's left of _his_ voice told me that..."

"It lied to you," Rey says flatly. She rubs at her eyes with one hand. The exhaustion runs down to her bones, and she's utterly depleted. "I didn't — it's not that I wanted to run, I wasn't leaving you, I just— being confronted with that, not being able to pretend anymore that you..."

Ben watches her, expectant.

Rey sighs before purposefully lying down next to him in his narrow bunk, resting her head against his chest.

She feels a hesitant arm come around her shoulders, and she pulls it more firmly to herself.

"If you ever try to break a promise to me again, Ben Solo," Rey hears herself saying, and her voice is tight, "I'll kill you myself."

She turns on her side to face him, to gaze into those dark eyes that seem to run her through.

She recognizes longing, hurt, the glimmer of something close to hope, and she can feel it to her bones, how deeply he wants to believe her.

He cups her cheek, rises up on his elbows, and Rey closes her eyes, allows him to kiss her. He's hesitant, clearly unpracticed, but there's something burning deep behind it, in the way he clutches just a fraction too hard, the way he can't seem to pull her close enough.

_Rey,_ he thinks, and it's that soft, reverent tone, the one that sparks something deep in her belly, the one that she can feel his heart bleed through.

The kiss turns deeper, more frantic, the bond humming with _I nearly lost you, you came back,_ and this thing that Rey has so long avoided putting words to running fierce and hot between them.

She knows, distantly, that the Resistance is likely listening.

She knows there are grave consequences likely awaiting her back on Geonosis, once she returns to her corporeal self, once she leaves the clinging embrace of the bond.

But as her skin brushes against Ben's, as he kisses her, strokes her hair back from her forehead, holds her close, and she opens herself to feel.

He's alive, with her.

Here in this moment, just for now, nothing else matters.


	4. Part IV

Rey wakes alone in her bunk on Geonosis, blankets clumsily tucked around her, the phantom imprint of a kiss still tingling pleasantly along her cheekbone.

_Where?_ she thinks, still sleep-drunk and disoriented, gazing out the transparisteel to the rise of the midday sun.

Her eyes widen suddenly as she remembers, and she dives headlong into the bond, frantic. _Ben_ _!_

_Please let him be all right._

The bond is dimmed, not quite shuttered, but when she presses through, she catches only the barest imprint of Arbooine, a soft breeze, a whisper of pine.

She can feel Ben on the other side of it, quiet and solemn, and she feels him gently reach out and hold her in place as she tries to push through.

_My mother sent a message,_ she hears him say. The bond is shifting with dark gray shadows, but Ben is steady, anchored to her through the light.

Rey frowns a little, sitting up in her bunk and resting her elbows on her thighs. _I thought there was a communications blackout on Arbooine? No comms, no satellite transmissions?_

She can see his faint smile. _Never stopped you, and my mother makes you look downright agreeable in comparison._

She's not sure if that's an insult towards herself or to Leia — probably a compliment to both, given Ben's sense of humor. _What did she say?_

Ben hesitates, and Rey feels the brush of lips against her forehead, a gentle stroke across her temple. _Ask her yourself. And don't be angry with her when you do._

* * *

"Have a seat, Rey."

Rey is quiet as she sits down in one of the richly-upholstered armchairs in Leia's quarters, takes up the cup of tea set down in front of her.

Leia and Luke are sitting opposite, watching her.

She sips slowly.

"Ben appears to be out of harm's way," Luke says after a moment. "Vital signs are stable. No small feat, given that there was a clear blaster shot on the audio feed."

The cup in Rey's hand shakes as she sets it down against the saucer with a soft 'clink'.

"Several members of the tribunal expressed comments voicing their displeasure with the apparent failure of their 'contingency plan'." Leia's voice drips with venom, and Luke reaches across, lays a calming hand against her wrist. "Last I heard, Dand was on his way to the munitions team, said he wanted to find out if there was a chance the gas canister they'd loaded had been defective, that there should have been fatal damage."

"There was." Rey's voice is quiet, and she stares resolutely through the nearby transparisteel.

She sees Luke and Leia exchange a glance out of the corner of her eye. "There was some discussion about what role you might have played in saving him, Rey," Luke begins carefully. "Captain Javos has had a few run-ins with Force-sensitives. Started wondering aloud in the command room if the two of you could be connected somehow, if you could have healed him remotely."

Rey says nothing, but there's a hint of fear in her eyes as she turns, looks to him.

"I told her that's not how the Force works," Luke says quietly. "That he would have had to heal himself in order to pull through. That it's impossible to truly heal through another person, especially for wounds that deep. He'd have to do it on his own."

He's staring at her, through her, eyes soft with meaning.

"You know, don't you," Rey murmurs.

Luke smiles faintly, shrugs. "Let's just say that neither you nor Ben are particularly subtle people. Especially in the Force."

Rey almost manages to return his smile at that. "I'm sorry," she says, after a long moment. "I didn't set out to disobey you, I was just..."

"Trying to help." Leia reaches across, pats her knee. "We know. And by the Force, if my son isn't crazy about you. Don't know how we missed that one for so long. You should have seen the look on Dand's face with _that_ audio feed."

"Leia." Luke sighs, and Rey can feel herself flushing down to her toes.

Leia shrugs, but there's a mischievous glint in her eyes, forever just a hint of the wild, untameable youth of the rebellious princess behind the staid general. "I can't regret it, that we're here," she says.

The brightness in her eyes fades into something more muted, and she suddenly seems fixated on the ring curving along her right ring finger. "That's the first time I reached out to my son and felt him answer," she murmurs. "First time since he was fifteen. Stubborn as a duncow, that one, just like his—" She closes her eyes, and the specter of Han seems to linger in the room even with his name unspoken.

Rey hesitates, glances to Luke.

She wants to tell Leia what she knows.

_He loved his father._

_He loved both of you._

_He remembers more than he can speak of yet._

_But he'll come home. He will._

_He's already halfway there._

Luke shakes his head at her, just a fraction, and Rey nods.

Ben will tell her himself.

In time. 

"Does the tribunal know, then?" Rey asks, taking another sip of tea. "About..." She gestures to her temple.

Luke hesitates, glancing to Leia. "Well, although a few of the more astute tribunal members noticed certain signs that would indicate the existence of something resembling a Force bond, we thought it best if they happened to conveniently forget that those signs had ever occurred."

"Luke Jedi Mind Tricked the hell out of them," Leia says flatly.

Luke drops his head into his hands on a muffled curse. "I made subtle mental suggestions—"

"That Ben healed himself through the Force and Rey had no idea that anything happened. I'm not sure if half of them even know she was on-world last night by the time you got through with them. Bravo, the moral gray area lives to see another day. So." Leia begins, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning back in her chair. "Here we are. Five months left to Ben's sentence. The war is over, the galaxy rebuilding. What are your next steps, Rey?"

Rey furrows her brow in confusion, sets her tea down again. "What do you mean?"

Leia frowns. "Ben didn't tell you?"

There's a cold slice down Rey's spine. "Tell me what?"

Leia curses low under her breath. "Always leaving the hard calls to me," she grumbles. "Him and his father both, always conveniently gone when the bantha fodder falls." She straightens, fixes Rey with a level stare. "Rey, Ben has agreed to try to shut down the Force bond between you again, until his sentence is complete. It'll give you time to get off this backwater, explore the galaxy, stretch your legs and experience everything you're missing here."

Rey narrows her eyes a fraction. "You want me to just leave? When he's coming back in just a few months?"

"Rey," Leia begins placidly.

"He almost died. The silence, that isolation, you've seen what it's done, how it's taken a toll on him. He's already thought I abandoned him once, and that's on top of..."

"Rey." Luke's voice is gentle, and Rey angrily brushes it off.

"I know what it's like to be dropped off somewhere and to spend weeks and months and years thinking that maybe this time they'll come back." Her heartbeat is thundering in her ears, and she rises to her feet, fists balled at her sides. "Then to have them forget you, to leave you to your fate without a care in the world, and you expect me to do that to him."

"Rey. It was Ben's idea."

Rey's voice seems to fade, her shoulders going slack as she stares at Luke.

He rises to his feet, calmly meets Rey's bewildered gaze. "I've made my peace with the fact that you two have grown," he gestures vaguely, "special to each other. I may not have been too keen on the idea on Ahch-To, and I can't say my feelings have much changed on the matter now, but the Force moves mysteriously."

He sighs. "But Rey, we didn't want the bond between you closed to punish you. Either of you. What we saw, what we feared happening was Ben needing you for strength instead of learning to heal through himself and hold fast to the light on his own."

"And you, Rey," Leia chimes in softly, "that loyal heart of yours is too big to leave someone behind, even if it meant waiting at the expense of yourself, even if that someone was as big a nerf-herder as my son."

Rey sits down weakly, and her chest feels frozen, caved in. "So that's it?" she asks. "For the next five months I just leave him to his exile? To that isolation that almost took him away once already?"

"If you want what's best for him, and for yourself, yes," Leia says. "That's what we're asking. What he's asking."

Rey swallows hard around the lump that seems to have risen to her throat. "And if I say no?"

Luke shrugs a little. "Only you can choose your path, Rey. But." He hesitates. "If you see that path aligning with Ben's, I would respect his wishes as well."

She feels cold and hot all at once, something that feels oddly like a spike of betrayal curving sharply under her breastbone.

She rises to her feet, looks to Leia.

_Don't hate her_ , he'd said, the voice through the bond soft, apologetic.

_I don't,_ she thinks towards him, even as it impacts against shuttered walls. _But I'm not particularly fond of you at the moment._

"Five months," Rey says quietly.

Leia is quiet for a long moment before standing, pulling Rey into a loose embrace.

"Luke wanted to start the year all over again," she whispers into Rey's ear.

She must feel the responding tension in Rey's shoulders, and she laughs. "He drew the line at that, Rey," she says softly. "Said Luke might be operating by Jedi rules, but he's not quite selfless enough to give you up for that long just yet."

 

* * *

 

It's difficult to fall asleep that night, with the bond shuttered between them, but it's an easier thing than it had been before. There's something calmer, more peaceful around the space where it lies dormant than the tightly-held roil of emotions Ben had bled through months earlier.

Months ago, when Rey had first reached out to him, never knowing just how inextricably they would become intertwined, even then.

It takes long, restless hours, but she finally falls into a light, uneven sleep, there beneath the dusty moons along the Geonosian horizon.

She's startled as the dreamscape shifts and fades into the soft green meadow she had found in Ben's dreams months earlier. She sees Ben at its edge, a smudge of dirt along his cheek as he kneels along a flower bed, inspecting a row of tidy blossoms.

Rey recognizes the distinctive curling petals of nightbloomers, and her heart turns over in her chest.

Ben glances up at her, something guarded in his gaze as she kneels down beside him, sits back on her heels. "Hi," she says quietly.

He nods. "Did you talk to my mother?"

Rey licks her thumb and ignores his frown as she wipes away the dirt on his cheek. "I did," she says. There's a soft breeze that rustles the grasses around them, and she closes her eyes, feels it against her skin.

"Are you angry with her?"

She looks at him, his wary posture, the way he glances sidelong to her and absently strokes the petals of a nearby nightbloomer. "I was angry with you, at first," she says finally. "I thought—"

Ben frowns. "I know what you thought."

"I doubt it."

He raises an eyebrow at her, taps his temple, and Rey rolls her eyes.

"I don't want you waiting for me," Ben says. He stands, offers Rey a hand and pulls her to her feet. "I don't want you just sitting on Geonosis and rotting away until I finish out my sentence."

"Charming."

"You know what I mean. Again, Geonosis _,_ Rey."

"Makes Jakku look habitable, I know." She sighs, allows Ben to pull her into a tight embrace, turns her head in against his chest. "I suppose if it's best for you."

Ben is quiet for a long moment, absently stroking her hair.

"What's best for you is what's best for me. That's how friendship works, right?"

Rey fists her hands in his shirt over his shoulder blades, laughs and tilts her head up to offer him a watery smile. "We're friends, then?"

Ben cups her chin in his hand, and Rey rises up on tiptoe, slides her hands up to tangle in his hair as he kisses her, slow and deep.

_If by that you mean you're the brightest star in my galaxy,_ he thinks, nudging her nose with his, _then yes._

_By the Force, Ben, that's dreadful._ Rey rolls her eyes fondly, bites her lip as he breaks the kiss, only to trail his lips like branding fire down the pale column of her throat.

_Give me a break,_ she hears, and she shivers as he nips at her collarbone. _I'm new at this._

_You'll have five months to yourself. I'll expect far more proper awful seduction lines if you expect this to continue._

Rey can't help but smile as he lays her back against the grass, kissing her soundly before taking her wrists in a loose hold and pressing them above her head.

"Got you, sweetheart," he murmurs, and there's something dark, something deep in his eyes as he gazes down at her.

Rey can only nod, her heart turning over. "Got me," she says, and her voice sounds breathless even to her own ears.

 

* * *

 

It feels like goodbye, even though it's not quite.

There are tears in her eyes as Ben kisses her, lips soft and warm against every inch of her bare skin, and even with the bond scarcely opened, she can feel his devotion burned into every touch.

She hears her name on his lips again, that deep, throaty moan from the night everything had turned upside down, only now, it's her hands, her lips against his throat, her gentle shushing and adoring whispers.

He doesn't stop kissing her, even as his arms wrap tightly around her, as he helps her lift her hips and then gods, he's inside her, breath heavy and hot against her ear. It's clumsy, awkward, and it hurts, but as she clutches at Ben's shoulders, feels him press reverent kisses into her skin, everything fades into the way the bond is awash in relief and adoration, the way they meld together, the way the Force seems to vibrate around them, the way the galaxy itself seems to tilt and shatter.

After, Ben clings to her, his face buried in her hair, arms tight around her, and Rey curls in against his chest, heart beating wildly.

_I love you._ She feels it more than she hears it, breathed into the bond, raw and open and aching.

Rey closes her eyes, kisses the line of his jaw, lets him draw her closer, just for now, just for a little longer.

"I know," she whispers.

 

* * *

 

The chrono in Rey's quarters buzzes harshly, and she wakes, eyes struggling to adjust in the dim light. It's not quite morning, and the Geonosian moons are still bright and full above the horizon.

Rey rises wordlessly from her bunk and stares up at them, presses her fingers to the transparisteel.

The bond is quiet. She and Ben hadn't said their goodbyes, merely held and clung and kissed until the meadow faded into nothing around them, until the dreamscape dissipated into fine mist.

She had wondered, once, if Arbooine had a moon, if Ben had ever watched it and gazed across the stars to her the same way she had him.

_Watch the moon,_ she thinks to him, across the bond, hopes that he'll catch it, if not now, then one day. _And think of me watching the same sky, no matter where I am, no matter how far apart we are._

Rey kisses her fingertips, presses them to the transparisteel, and turns away.

 

* * *

 

**FIVE STANDARD MONTHS LATER**

* * *

 

"You know," Luke gripes, huddling into his thick robes, "I've done my time. I served on Hoth. You could have asked my input before plunking the Resistance down on an ice ball like Helska IV."

Leia rearranges her scarf and affords her brother a long-suffering stare. "Jedi Masters who abandon their friends in a time of need don't get input on future base locations," she notes. "You missed out on D'Qar through your own choices, not mine. We had a pool."

Luke grumbles, gazing out at the launch pad through the driving snow from his place huddled in against the base exterior. "She should be here any time now."

"And my son not far behind her, no doubt. Do you think they timed it that way?"

"You're the one who's spoken to him, not me. But I wouldn't put it past them."

Leia grins and shakes her head. "No, they've been good. I think Rey's been too busy to contact anyone. Or at least I think that's why her last comm was over a month ago. Remind me to talk to that girl about keeping in touch. Some of us have alliances to rebuild and can't spend our days cliff-diving on Naboo or climbing mountains on Scipio," she grumbles.

"Fighter approaching, general: appears to be a one-man ship, X-wing class."

Leia grins, taps the comm at her wrist. "Looks like our girl's on her way home."

 

* * *

 

"Prepare landing coordinates, BB-8," Rey says, angling the ship down through the planet's atmosphere. She grimaces, rolling her shoulders, the muscles stiff from the weight of her pack as she'd spelunked through the caves of Vagadarr. She'd have to see about visiting the masseur Rose had mentioned on Coruscant one day if this kept up.

Rey smiles, glances at the picture of herself, Finn, and Rose pinned along the cockpit of her fighter. That first morning after she and Ben had parted ways, she'd asked to leave the Falcon at the base hangar in favor of a borrowed X-wing. When Leia had asked why, she'd simply pointed out that they'd made it clear that now was not the time for her to have a co-pilot.

(Ben would have hated that joke, she knew, and she'd smiled inwardly.)

Her first destination had been an easy choice, and she'd barely landed at the Resistance rendezvous point on Coruscant before she was running across the docking bay, launching herself into Finn's arms and laughing deliriously.

"You've got to tell me what you've been up to out there on Geonosis!" Finn had said, and Rey could only smile weakly in response.

"How much time do you have?" she'd asked.

She'd ended up staying for over a month, dizzy with the sights and sounds, putting high-profile names to faces, fighting back happy tears at the way Finn carried himself among the storied ranks of the reassembled New Republic, the way there seemed to be a never-ending line of people wanting to shake his hand, to thank him for his service to the galaxy.

(She'd always try to be the last one to catch his attention for the night, hugging him tight and whispering "Big Deal" in his ear, squealing as he pinched her and swung her around.)

At night, she'd explore Coruscant City, watch the myriad life forms that filled its streets and shops, fascinated by the endless flow of traffic.

After a month, though, she'd noticed the way Finn and Rose would pull apart when she returned to their shared apartment, the way Rose's eyes always seemed to follow Finn wherever he went, the way their hands seemed to naturally settle against each other.

Rey had found herself standing with her arms wrapped around herself in their guest bedroom, staring up at the sky, through the industrial haze to the rise and fall of Coruscant's moons.

She'd left the next morning, hugging Finn and Rose tightly.

(She'd pulled Finn close, whispered that she'd expect an invite to the wedding, grinned devilishly as he flushed.)

Before she left Coruscant, she'd bought a cheap holocam and a galaxy guide, slipped both into her pack, and headed for her ship.

From there, it had almost been a challenge, to explore as many worlds, as many systems as she could. She'd spotted octowhales on Dac, traversed the jungles of Imdaar, played sabacc on Skärtis.

At night, she'd sleep in the narrow cockpit of her X-wing, there under the stars and moons of whatever world she'd found herself on, and think of Arbooine.

Rey grins as she lands, recognizes the figures of Leia and Luke there at the edge of the landing pad.

"Good to have you back, Rey," she hears Leia say warmly over the comm.

"And him?" She can't help it, her heart is almost singing.

"Departed Arbooine at 0600 _._ Should be just behind you." She hears Leia hesitate. "Are you ready?"

Rey bites her lip, unbuckling her harness with one hand and fingering the strap of her satchel with the other. "I don't know," she says honestly. "Are you?"

Leia laughs. "Not even a little _.”_

She can almost see the general's knowing grin as she engages the cockpit release. "Fortunately, I doubt I'll be the first person he looks for _._ "

 

* * *

 

Rey wraps her hands around the mug of caf a kindly-faced flight deck attendant had brought her, staring up, unblinking, at the clear night sky.

She starts, nearly spills her caf as a she feels a warm hand against her shoulder. "Rey," Luke says, "come into the base. It's freezing out here, and he's delayed for storms."

"I'm fine, thank you." She sips her caf, unconcerned.

Luke sighs. "You know, you can meet his ship without freezing to death out here in the docking bay. We do have flight radar inside."

"Five months, Luke." Her eyes never leave the slowly-rising moon. "That was the agreement."

Luke frowns, just a little, before nodding and heading back into the base.

Rey doesn't turn to watch him go, her gaze singularly focused on the moon.

The bond is still quiet, and for the first time in months, she feels the empty press of it.

The military tribunal that had handed down Ben's sentence had convened earlier that day, arguing quietly amongst themselves.

Rey had watched from the gallery, tamping down the rise of anger that bubbled through her chest.

"Careful, Rey," Luke had said when she'd balked at not being a part of the proceedings. "They think you had nothing to do with anything after the sentencing. We'd best keep it that way."

So she'd sulked, arms crossed tightly over her chest, as they'd deliberated what to do with a prisoner they'd never intended to return.

"He wasn't supposed to survive isolation," the Squamatan had insisted, baring her teeth at Leia, visibly unnerved as the general's steely gazed seemed to run her through.

"Really? I must have missed that particular proviso within deliberations." Leia, for all her short stature, is a dynamo, and Rey had smiled to herself as the tribunal members had seemed to cower in the face of her rage. "The agreement was that Kylo Ren was to be sentenced to one year's distraction-free exile on Arbooine. He has served out that sentence. We are now duty-bound to retrieve him safely from his imprisonment."

The Tarsunt had sighed, laid his glasses down against the desk in front of him and pressed his thumbs to his eyes, but said nothing.

Leia had turned to Rey, their eyes meeting across the chamber, and in her gaze, Rey could see everything Leia had no need to put to words.

_Thank you for keeping him safe._

_Thank you for bringing him home._

* * *

 

The freighter is hideous, squat and dun-colored, its hull scratched and dented as it kicks up snow and ice during its landing sequence.

It is the most beautiful thing Rey has ever seen in her life.

Still, she hesitates, her hands trembling at her sides as the ship powers down, as a phalanx of armed guards appears at the edge of the landing pad, weapons down, posture wary.

They remember who their prisoner had been.

Rey does as well, and she hesitates, can't seem to take her eyes from the still-raised docking ramp.

Five months.

What if the isolation had broken him? Leia had confirmed that his vital signs had stayed strong and steady, and that the few brief comms she'd exchanged with him were brief, tense, but amicable.

But she couldn't know, not really, if he'd wanted to hide from her.

Rey feels her breath catch in her throat as the ramp engages and begins to slowly lower.

And what if he'd forgotten _her_ , if healing had meant carving out a dispassionate space in the Force like the one Luke inhabits, in which _there is no passion, there is the Force_ , and could she stand it, if the price for his peace was cool indifference to her?

A dark-haired figure in light fatigues ducks under the ramp, into the silver moonlight of Helska IV, and Rey's heart clenches in her chest.

A year since she's seen him in the flesh, outside of the bond. He's somehow even taller _,_ sturdier, even a hundred yards off.

His eyes meet hers across the landing pad, and Rey's breath catches as the bond flares to life, every nerve ending sparking, and then she hears it, a soft, reverent whisper, somewhere between laughing and crying:

_Rey._

She's never moved faster, even over snow and ice, and she fairly slams into Ben, staggers him off balance as he swings her up into his arms, cups her cheek in one cold hand and tugs her down to press his lips to hers, searing and deep, the bond sighing, full.

Kissing him in realspace is even better than in the bond, she thinks, and Ben must hear her because she can feel his rakish grin, the way he kisses her harder.

_Welcome home,_ she thinks into the bond, clutches him tighter.

Ben rests his forehead against hers as she slides down against him to the ground. "I promised you, didn't I?" he asks, and leans down to kiss her again.

 

* * *

 

They walk hand-in-hand into the base, and Ben seems to still beside her as they're greeted by the unsmiling tribunal members, Luke and Leia beside them.

"Kylo Ren," the Tarsunt greets him. He is not smiling.

Ben is unmoved by the use of his former name and nods his head a fraction. "General Dand."

"Our tribunal, as you know, sentenced you to one year's isolation on Arbooine."

_You don't say._ Ben frowns as Rey irritably pinches the back of his hand. "Ow _._ Yes."

"The last condition, should you survive, which," the Tarsunt scowls, just slightly, "it would appear you have."

"Sorry to disappoint you." There's a hint of darkness in Ben's tone, a rigidity to his spine, and Rey squeezes his hand.

He says nothing, but Rey is relieved when he squeezes back.

"You are to exit Resistance airspace by 2300, and you will be prohibited from returning to any," the Tarsunt adjusts his glasses and reads from the datapad in his hand, "Resistance-held bases, territories, Core worlds, Mid-Rim worlds, inhabited asteroids, remotely habitable worlds..."

"So Jakku is still on the table. _Ow._ "

"...and will submit to tracker surveillance from now until such time as you are no longer deemed an imminent threat by a New Republic council." The Tarsunt looks at Ben disdainfully over his glasses. "Which, I assure you, I intend to personally convene and adjudicate for as long as I am able to do so."

Ben is quiet under the Tarsunt's piercing stare, and his disdainful bluster seems to wither. He merely nods, allows Rey to twine their fingers together, leans gratefully against her offered shoulder.

_At least you're alive_ , Rey whispers through the bond. _At least you're here._

* * *

Ben spends his last few hours on base tucked away in Leia's office with his mother and Luke.

Rey finds him in the docking bay just shy of 2300, and his eyes are red, his shoulders hunched.

She leans up, loops her arms around his neck and holds him close. "Overwhelming?" she murmurs against him.

Ben sighs, buries his face in her unbound hair. "A year away from them," he says quietly. "Still not enough to heal old wounds."

"It was quite a few years before that, remember," Rey says.

Ben laughs, sharp and humorless. "I'll be ground to dust before I forget."

She closes her eyes, sends a wave of comfort through the bond as she feels the faded undercurrent of darkness and discontent run through him.

It'll be a long journey to healing, she knows.

But an easier one with someone to walk beside you.

Rey kisses Ben's cheek gently as she disengages the embrace, sliding down to take his hand and slipping her satchel onto her shoulder. "Now come on."

Ben stares in confusion at their clasped hands even as he lets Rey lead him through the hangar, past X-wings and A-wings, and a handful of personal crafts.

Rey feels the sharp pain in his chest as the _Falcon_ comes into view. She's been thoroughly scrubbed and re-painted, given a complete systems overhaul and a deep clean from top to bottom.

"I'll be damned, that garbage heap is actually white," she hears Ben exclaim in wonderment beside her.

"A gift from your mother," Rey notes, guiding Ben beneath the _Falcon's_ hull and patting the durasteel with her free hand. "While I was off-world, I entrusted the _Falcon_ to her. Said it should have really been hers, anyway. I thought she'd try to scrap it for parts or, well, burn it or something, but apparently all she'd wanted for decades is to _clean_ it. Not that it'll stay that way, wherever we end up is likely to be a bit more wild than this place, but still, it almost looks rather posh for now."

Ben's brow furrows as he turns to stare at Rey. "Wherever we end up?"

Rey's lips tilt into a smile as she readjusts her satchel. "I need a co-pilot."

"I see."

"And, well, my options are limited. So." She shrugs. "You seem to know your way well enough around ships."

"Well." Ben reaches up, and Rey watches as he strokes tentative fingers over the Falcon's hull. "I've piloted this one," he says, very quietly. "Once or twice."

He starts as Rey slips an arm around his waist. "Almost 2300," she says.

Ben takes a deep breath, then nods.

 

* * *

 

"I should really be in the pilot's chair."

"Yeah, no. Did you plug the data into the navcomputer yet?"

"No _,_ because that is the _co-pilot's_ job."

"Glad you know your responsibilities, then. Off you go."

Ben slumps down in his seat, sulking as Rey pilots the _Falcon_ past the base shields.

Rey glances sidelong at him, guides the yoke with one hand and reaches the other across to ghost along his shoulder.

Ben doesn't look at her, but she can see the faint hint of a smile cross his lips. "I heard you explored a lot while we were apart," he says as Helska IV fades into the distance.

Rey smiles back at him, nodding towards her satchel. "Holocam, there on the bottom," she says softly.

He stares at her quizzically for a long moment before opening the satchel and retrieving the small folded-up cam, turning it over in his hands.

"Red button, there on the—"

"I can figure it out," Ben grouses, thumbing awkwardly at a switch on the side.

The cam projects outward, and Ben leans back in the co-pilot's chair as a vivid jungle world flickers to life, all twisted vines and ferned canopies.

The cam lens tips and turns backwards.

And then there's Rey's smiling face, tanned from the sun. "Today I'm on Imdaar," she says to the cam, holding it aloft in one hand. "I don't think it's too much different from Arbooine, at least in terms of the amount of green, but it's different here. Definitely hotter. I think you'd complain about that, most likely, the insects as well."

Ben looks at her, and Rey returns it with a small smile.

There are hours of footage on the cam's internal drives, and Ben watches silently as Rey films and describes her surroundings on every world she visits, notes points of interest he'd find intriguing.

Every tour ends with a lingering shot of the planet's moons.

"Just in case you forgot," Rey says after one particularly breathtaking moonrise.

Ben swallows hard, leans across to the pilot's chair, flicks on the autopilot one-handed and draws her into a kiss.

_Not for a single second, sweetheart. Not once._

* * *

Rey gazes down at the planet surface as they break out of hyperspace, sees mottled green and streaks of blue, the wobbly orbit of a small moon.

She raises an eyebrow at Ben as he leans back in the co-pilot's chair. "Weren't you just here?" she asks.

He smiles at her, the soft, hidden one that still makes her heart skip a beat. "I got to see what you did for five months," he says, punching a set of coordinates into the navcomputer. "Your turn."

 

* * *

 

The second Rey steps off the _Falcon_ , she recognizes a world that she's never before set foot on.

Crisp pine. Fragrant green air and fresh lake water.

Arbooine.

"It grows on you," Ben notes, retrieving their bags from the Falcon's hold.

Rey closes her eyes, breathes it in.

_This much green in the whole galaxy..._

Ben takes her hand, and she lets him.

 

* * *

 

It's a longer hike than she'd anticipated, but Rey is wide-eyed, her heart full as she takes in the world she'd only seen through Ben's eyes before, all dense forest and rushing waters.

It's all so familiar, somehow, every landmark, every sight even larger, more vivid in realspace than it had been in the bond.

There, in the distance, the silver-tipped mountains she'd watched Ben climb as she'd hiked the Geonosian plains and they'd discussed Jedi history.

There, a few yards from the path, the rocky shore of the lake that Ben had rested beside as she'd read to him.

And there...

Rey's breath catches as they step into a wide clearing.

Ben's cabin, fully finished, every beam in place, a sturdy, sloped roof, dark wood stained and gleaming in the dappled mid-day sun.

There's an oversized window along the south wall, set with a pane of transparisteel, a carefully-crafted planter box hung at its lintel.

"It's not fully furnished yet," Ben blurts out, as Rey gapes at the sight before them. "Mostly leftovers I scavenged from the base ruins. I've talked to my mother about it every time she's checked in, and she's insisting that she'll send furnishings, but then the Force knows she'll want to visit."

"It's so much bigger than I thought it was," Rey says. She steals from Ben's side to walk around the cabin's perimeter, lingering by the south-facing window, fingertips running over the planter box. "Were those schematics to scale?"

Kylo is quiet for a long moment, watching as she peers through the window. "I..." He's awkward, hesitant, and Rey eyes him curiously.

"It has two bedrooms now."

Her eyes widen.

Ben is wary as he approaches her, stops just beyond her reach, can't quite meet her eyes. "Back then," he says quietly, "when I didn't know if I'd ever get out of here, when I looked at you and would never have dared to hope."

He frowns, scrubs a hand over his face in frustration. "Just in case you ever wanted to. It saw me through, sometimes. The thought that you might ever be close enough to need one."

Rey is quiet, running her hand along a nearby post: the same one she had watched him sand down as their bond had begun to deepen, as she'd felt the first stirrings of something warm, something she couldn't name then.

She looks at Ben, his awkward posture, the way he's looking at her like she's hung the stars and moon, and oh, how she knows it now.

"Good," she says, wills her voice to remain steady even as she struggles not to burst into a grin. "We'll have an extra room next to ours for when your mother visits."

Ben blinks at her, uncomprehending, until her words register and he stares at her, wide-eyed.

Rey takes two steps forward until they're toe-to-toe, takes Ben's chin in her hand and draws him down to kiss her.

The bond is settled, full, and Rey feels the swelling contentment, the adoration that sings through it as Ben tilts her back and kisses her harder.

_It still needs work,_ she thinks into the bond, trails her fingers over Ben's spine. _Plants need east-facing light as well._

_You could have told me that before I hung the windows._

_You didn't ask._

_I'm not knocking down walls. We're a south-facing plant family now._

_If you can build a cabin to twice its original size, you can help me re-do a window._

Ben sighs in frustration, and it's ridiculous, _they're_ ridiculous, how they ended up here, how the first spark of an unwanted bond has blossomed into a love that runs so deep, burns so bright.

Rey threads her fingers into his hair, rests her forehead against his.

"Welcome home, Ben," she whispers.


End file.
